by Aseem Gupta | May 31, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Most books about happiness begin with an assumption that Will Buckingham refuses to grant: that everyone already knows what happiness is. Introducing Happiness: A Practical Guide, first published by Icon Books in 2012, instead begins by asking whether pleasure, life...
by Aseem Gupta | May 28, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Kitty Flanagan’s 488 Rules for Life: The Thankless Art of Being Correct is built around a contradiction that becomes clearer the longer it goes on. It presents itself as a comprehensive manual for behaving properly, yet its author repeatedly admits that she is...
by Aseem Gupta | May 26, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Marc Summers’s 99 Bad Boy Traits: That Instantly Attract Women, first published as a digital edition in 2015, belongs to a familiar strain of heterosexual male dating advice: the man who struggles with women is told that his problem is not insufficient kindness but...
by Aseem Gupta | May 24, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
Lilyan Wilder’s 7 Steps to Fearless Speaking is built around a deceptively simple proposition: the way to become less afraid of speaking is not to become better at pretending not to be afraid. It is to become more deeply involved in what you are saying, why you...
by Aseem Gupta | May 20, 2020 | Book Summaries and Analysis
George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons is the fifth novel in A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is not simply the story that begins where A Feast for Crows ends. Its opening sections return to characters who disappeared after A Storm of Swords—Jon Snow, Daenerys...
