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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3805 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Non fiction recommendations

Be careful. Malcolm Gladwell is full of shit. At best he writes pseudoscience. If you're looking for some sort of general introduction to nonfiction, there are probably a hundred thousand books you should read before you start in on Gladwell.





pajammin  ·  3804 days ago  ·  link  ·  

i just finished a Psychology degree and before I started it I really liked Malcolm Gladwell and thought he was spot on, but to be honest a lot of the pop Psych I personally find unconvincing. It's kind of like they've been made to dine out on. They're interesting but I don't think very scientific. Do still quite like them though I guess.

Just while I'm commenting, OP my favourite nonfiction book I've read recently was Guns, Germs & Steel - but I think it might suffer from the same sort of thing I was just talking about.

user-inactivated  ·  3804 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I guess it was inevitable Jared Diamond show up in this thread. Similar to what I said about the Selfish Gene (though the authors aren't remotely on the same level) -- if all you read is Guns, Germs and Steel, you'll have an incomplete picture of cultural anthropology and so on. Back when I read it I also read scientific reactions to it; not pretty. w/e