Scott’s Book Review: What Worlds Will You Explore?

  • The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever
    By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics…
  • Superteams: The Science & Secrets of High-Performing Teams
    In today’s workplace, teams represent the instrument of enacting change. Yet anyone who’s served on a team realizes that team dynamics are key to maintaining a healthy atmosphere to make those contributions. Many books suggest ways to improve teams, but relatively few of them are based on critical studies to discern if their ideas actually work. Ron Friedman’s book, in contrast, begins as a study. He identifies top-performing teams in terms of output and nicknames…

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The World of Science & Health

  • The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever
    By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics…
  • Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction
    Global health is a field known, in the past, as international health and colonial health. It has recently sought to center itself around health equity – that every person deserves decent healthcare to have a decent life. Thus, it has tried to remove any shackles of Western imperialism from its conceptualization. Also recently, Paul Farmer and Partners in Health have brought attention to the field, especially in Haiti and Rwanda. A large braintrust centered around…
  • Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia
    There are many angles to motivate reading this book, and mine is from a deep interest in HIV. The supermodel known simply as “Gia” was one of the first prominent women to die of AIDS-related complications, and she remains one of the best-explored IV drug users who died from AIDS. Of course, most of the world knows her as a model who quickly rose to the front pages of the world’s leading fashion magazines in…
  • Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss & Addiction
    If you’re looking to cry in empathy with an author’s grief and hardships yet sense an undercurrent of hope, this memoir might be the book for you. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a missionary kid in Madrid, Spain. His parents tried to “save” people for heaven in a new church, but failed. Then they pivoted their ministry to help people overcome heroin addiction, and they slowly grew a church and social service. However, the HIV/AIDS…

The World of Technology & Work

Business / Management

Software / Engineering / Data / AI

  • Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT: Unleash Your Prompt Engineering Potential with OpenAI Technologies for Productivity and Creativity
    Most of us are impressed with how well Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced, but we’re still struggling to use it to improve our personal productivity. We’ve heard of the promises but fear the shortcomings, too. Books like Valentina Alto’s Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT can point the way to us capitalizing on the promise in our personal work. Alto briefly covers the topic of Prompt Engineering that’s key to making the most out of…
  • Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications
    Machine learning (ML) is a hot yet daunting topic. It’s perhaps the most important technological advancement supporting the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), and most leading IT companies have been extracting value from it for some time. Almost every time predictions are made by a computer, like when a product or really anything is recommended, ML is at work. This book explains in technical detail how to get ML projects out of theory and into…

The World of People Skills

Writing / Communication

  • Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others & Maximizing Your Personal Impact
    We’d like to think that our social lives and businesses are meritocracies, but they clearly aren’t. The best ideas don’t always win, and much depends on how one presents themselves. In a world where people make quick judgments about leaders, quickly conveying trust matters more than ever before. Communications expert Nick Morgan teaches us how to master those soft skills of leadership. Generally, this book is filled with solid advice about public speaking in settings…
  • The Secrets of Story
    Matt Bird graduated with an MFA from an Ivy League university, but soon found that he knew a lot less about a writing career than he thought. After graduation, instead of just pleasing his teachers, he had to learn to work in the storytelling industry – sink or swim. To move forward, he has spent his life rigorously looking at successful stories as they actually are and what makes them work. His wisdom eventually brought…

Research / Education / Mentoring

  • The National Institutes of Health: 1991-2008
    To those interested in healthcare research in America, understanding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) represents a formidable challenge. Few books address the topic well, and most investigators follow the NIH’s trends with deep interest. Even though this book represents history from decades ago – 15 years is a long time in American politics and in research – this book remains relevant to understand the historical trends still operative in this great institution. Reading this…
  • Institutional Review Board Member Handbook
    Institutional Review Boards, or IRBs, review human-subjects research to ensure that they ethically affirm the rights of the participants in their research. I have some projects about to undergo IRB review, and though I’ve had successful reviews in the past, I wanted to better understand the issues involved in IRB approval. This book offered a concise, evidence-based summary of those very issues. The book is written primarily for those who are about to serve on…

Topics

The World of Social Science

Individuals

  • The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us & Divides Us
    Sometimes, it seems all we do on the Internet and social media is argue about whose activities are most superior and most important. We all want to “matter,” but we can develop elaborate defensive arguments about who gets there the best. Many times, our own need to matter gets in the way of recognizing what matters to other people. And yet needing to matter at something is one of the deepest human longings. We need…
  • Rebuilding Trust in the Workplace: Seven Steps to Renew Confidence, Commitment & Energy
    Trust and betrayal are inevitable parts of life, and likewise, they are parts of careers in the workplace. What happens when you encounter betrayal and trust issues at work? Some might leave, but that option doesn’t always seem feasible. Instead, you have to work on rebuilding trust in your workplace, and that’s easier said than done. This book, written by two leading experts on the psychology of workplace trust, can lead you in the process…

Society

  • The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever
    By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics…
  • The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise & the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers
    Organizational silos occur when groups of people in the same organization do not rely on each others’ insights because of various cultural reasons. While the division of labor that silos create is essential for any business, silos can inhibit an organization’s creativity and innovation. They have been weak points in or even downfalls of many great business empires. Through case studies across many organizations and industries, anthropologist Gillian Tett describes negative results silos can create…

The World of the Human Soul

Fiction / Stories / Poetry

  • The Wedding People: A Novel
    Phoebe Stone, an English professor from St. Louis, wants to kill herself at a lovely oceanfront hotel in Rhode Island. However, upon arrival, she encounters a hotel full of people ready for a six-day vacation wedding. Like most suicidal people, Phoebe tells someone about her agony – the bride-to-be. They end up engaging in honest conversation, and the bride-to-be begs Phoebe not to ruin her wedding week. Phoebe ends up not killing herself and gets…
  • O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
    This classic investigates the American frontier in the early 20th century. The protagonist Alexandra inherits a family farm in her youth. Even though the frontier seems rough and not a place for success, she decides to stick with it. Sixteen years later, she has grown a life of material riches, yet her personal life is somewhat insulated. She is lonely amidst all the financial prosperity. The world around her is divided by ethnic groups of…
  • The Last Father-Daughter Dance: A Short Story
    Kalista is a medal-winning runner training for her third Olympics when she discovers that her father is dying. She and her fiancé/business partner are in the middle of building a business, but amidst all the distractions, she realizes that her father deserves her attention most. In so doing, she rekindles childhood memories and reassesses what she values in life. As a short story, the script ends with most of those storylines still open and unresolved,…

History / Historical Fiction

  • How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women
    Most of us think of witchcraft as a relic of a hyper-religious past. Most of us also don’t have detailed beliefs about the practice of killing witches in the name of beating the devil – other than it’s wrong. However, the authors make a compelling case that the persecution of “witches” in prior centuries was just patriarchy rearing its ugly head. Seventy percent of accused witches were women; the other thirty percent were often the…
  • Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
    The Spanish Civil War was a historical precursor to World War II. Franco’s fascism for a time united disparate opposing groups like anarchists and communists. The opposition attracted volunteers from across Europe. However, these groups began infighting among each other, and the opposition ultimately failed. As with most failures, the blame game ran deep among groups. The great English writer George Orwell’s first-hand account provides as much light as can be shown upon the whole…

Biography / Memoir

  • The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever
    By the end of the Victorian age, men had dominated medical practice for centuries, but women were beginning to make inroads into the profession. A few, Mary Putnam Jacobi being the first, made inroads in European training centers and returned to the US to integrate women into American medicine. In this book, Lydia Reeder narrates their struggle and eventual victory that depathologized being a woman. By pursuing their personal questions, these women physician-scientists brought obstetrics…
  • Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia
    There are many angles to motivate reading this book, and mine is from a deep interest in HIV. The supermodel known simply as “Gia” was one of the first prominent women to die of AIDS-related complications, and she remains one of the best-explored IV drug users who died from AIDS. Of course, most of the world knows her as a model who quickly rose to the front pages of the world’s leading fashion magazines in…
  • Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss & Addiction
    If you’re looking to cry in empathy with an author’s grief and hardships yet sense an undercurrent of hope, this memoir might be the book for you. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a missionary kid in Madrid, Spain. His parents tried to “save” people for heaven in a new church, but failed. Then they pivoted their ministry to help people overcome heroin addiction, and they slowly grew a church and social service. However, the HIV/AIDS…

Spirituality / Philosophy / Religion

  • The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us & Divides Us
    Sometimes, it seems all we do on the Internet and social media is argue about whose activities are most superior and most important. We all want to “matter,” but we can develop elaborate defensive arguments about who gets there the best. Many times, our own need to matter gets in the way of recognizing what matters to other people. And yet needing to matter at something is one of the deepest human longings. We need…
  • A Summer with Pascal
    I’m a huge fan of French polymath Blaise Pascal simply because he provokes thought. Besides his scientific and mathematical contributions, he died before forming his greatest philosophical work into a coherent defense of the plausibleness of Christianity. Instead, they were left as a series of fragments for us to ponder in the following centuries. Simply titled Pensées (or “thoughts”), they give us insight into the spiritual life of one of history’s greatest scientific geniuses. This…
  • Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
    Søren Kierkegaard’s writings have long entranced me since I first ran across it as a teenager. He brought a thoughtful and philosophical approach towards the Christian life that didn’t center around being merely “churchy.” Indeed, as this biography testifies, he ran into conflicts with the institutional church throughout his life. Clare Carlisle details how Copenhagen received this eccentric bachelor before his eminence grew after his death. She particularly focuses on his love life as the…