Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Managing & Leading People through Organizational Change: The Theory & Practice of Sustaining Change through People

By Scott J. Pearson | July 8, 2025July 8, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Leading people through change remains a huge leadership issue in today’s quickly evolving world. Gaining soft skills to manage change also remains an essential leadership skill. Most books topping the bestseller lists inspire readers to help their organizations adapt better. This book is not one of those inspirational pieces. Rather, Julie Hodges guides readers through the entire field to see the diverse approaches required to help their people adapt. Instead of just triggering those with…

I’m a Biomedical Informatics Expert Now!

By Scott J. Pearson | July 7, 2025July 6, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

As someone in his mid-forties, I’m not in the intended audience for this book. Like the author, I went to medical school and work in biomedical informatics. I love figuring out how to help scientists and researchers help advance their ideas to better help patients. Having met and worked with Kevin Johnson, I can say that he’s the perfect person to write this book. He’s super smart but still approachable. He has a consistently great…

Software-Technology

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology

By Scott J. Pearson | July 6, 2025July 6, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

In an age of advanced technology, bugs and glitches have become a part of modern existence. We entrust complex machines like airplanes with our lives without so much as batting an eye. Nonetheless, especially when a technology is being pioneered or developed, there’s no way to escape mistakes… and those mistakes are sometimes fatal and tragic. Technology writer James Chiles describes himself as obsessed with tracing the history of technological mistakes. In this book, he…

Research-Education

Designing Quality Survey Questions

By Scott J. Pearson | June 28, 2025June 28, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

In our connected world, we’re inundated by data collection tools. Today’s technology surpasses the quality of anything we’ve had before, and sending out a mass survey is easier than ever. However, many researchers ask the same-old questions in the same-old style they’ve seen in prior surveys. In so doing, they repeat the same mistakes prior generations made. This book’s two expert/authors address ways to think about and formulate survey questions that give you the data…

Healthcare History Society

Everything is Tuberculosis: The History & Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

By Scott J. Pearson | June 27, 2025June 27, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Historians sometimes contend that before the fall of the Roman Empire, Western society possessed enough knowledge that our civilization could have advanced directly to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. Instead, the advent of the so-called Dark Ages reminds us that history does not always progress. We must seize the opportunities; our collective will and choices matter in history’s long arc. Novelist John Green has a self-described “obsession” with the disease of tuberculosis, or what…

Leadership Management-Business Psychology

An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization

By Scott J. Pearson | June 23, 2025June 23, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

I work with a career development team for researchers at an academic medical center. Developing researchers’ careers is our central role in the enterprise. We do not have a formal structure that this book describes, but an informal culture of synergy and growth is a huge part of what we cultivate. Because of a constantly evolving world, career and professional development can provide an edge for organizations. A culture of growth attracts and retains top…

Software-Technology

Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming

By Scott J. Pearson | June 22, 2025June 22, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

First, let me note this review is for the third edition, and a fourth edition recently came out. The fourth edition covers recent updates to JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript). I would have bought the fourth edition had I realized it when I made the purchase, but recent JavaScript language updates have not been dramatic. After I finished the third edition, I was able to read about them in a few minutes online to supplement…

Writing-Communication

Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide

By Scott J. Pearson | June 18, 2025June 18, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

I’ve struggled with narrative writing since I became aware of the genre while working on my high school newspaper staff. I could handle news articles well enough, and opinion pieces came easily enough. But embedding the nuance of narrative was something I never mastered. Although I retain a personal interest in writing decades later, my career in technology and science veered in different directions. I picked this book up with hopes of getting better at…

Society

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

By Scott J. Pearson | June 14, 2025June 14, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

A standard part of contemporary American culture is the division of society into “red” and “blue” components. Whether concerning states, cities, or ways of life, American society has become more polarized. Instead of the regionalism before the Civil War, these separations often have broken down between a rural versus urban dynamic. Some cities are even considered “red” havens. Bill Bishop first made these observations about 20 years ago, and this book culminated to define the…

Fiction-Stories

This is Happiness: A Novel

By Scott J. Pearson | June 9, 2025June 10, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Noe, short for Noel, is a teenage orphan who recently moved from Dublin to live with his grandparents in a small Irish town. Just prior, he enrolled in a seminary with the thought of seeking a priestly calling, but dropped out. Instead, he is now trying to find direction in life. Suddenly, in his small community of Faha, it stops raining, and the sun comes out. The sun never stays out in this rainy realm…