This does what it says on the tin, and it will be more or less valuable depending on the individual. I would have loved this at age 25 or so.

The writing is great. Accessible and personal, Bloom is skilled in making some dry material readable, and he brings humour and everyday examples to help make things clear.

If you’ve read a lot in the space. There may not be a wealth of new ideas here. A few chapters lean so close to Thinking, Fast and Slow that I was skimming them. Other chapters are familiar from takedowns of Gladwell’s stuff in publications like The Atlantic or the New Yorker.

Bloom doesn’t go for the pop-psychology ’one weird trick’ thing that make books like this into airport books. This won’t show up on If Books Could Kill, and that’s a good thing. It’s grounded in rational thinking and healthy skepticism. Bloom even takes a few popular studies to task for being misrepresented or poorly conceived.

Even when it wasn’t new to me though, it didn’t lose my interest. He’s a relentless optimist and the book has a lot of positivity in it. I don’t regret picking it up, I just wish it went a little deeper.