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http://www.amazon.com/How-Doctors-Think-Jerome-Groopman/dp/0547053649

“How Doctors Think” is a series of anecdotes by various doctors, interviewed by the authour, with the underlying theme of when/why/how doctors can make mistakes.

In the sense that it gave me insight into what really goes on behind the appearance of infallible expert, the book was fascinating. The authour talks about why doctors sometimes give you a multitude of answers, misdiagnose, rush, or don’t seem to care, by giving you the doctors’ perspective on the situation.

There are two aspects I didn’t care for, both closely related. Mind you, I got the book for insight into the doctor’s life and nothing more.

The first is the advice to the patients, where the authour tries to advise patients on what they can do to “help” the doctor avoid misdiagnosis. Encouraging patients to question the doctor or try to coach lateral thinking won’t be effective for all doctor-patient relationships or situations. I happen to like asking doctors questions, for my own edification, but I don’t know if that would work for everyone.

The second is the apparent theme to doctors, to be aware of potential for cognitive errors, and examples of how other doctors handle themselves to reduce the chances of those cognitive errors. Mildly intersting, but too much time spent on it considering I’m not a doctor and I imagine most readers wouldn’t be either?

Overall, though, I learned a lot about life in a doctor’s coat, and that makes it a great book for me.

I certainly tried to understand project management. And to the degree that my goal was simply to understand more about what and why project managers do what they do, I was successful.

A couple hundred pages in, however, I find myself trying to read faster to get through the pages more quickly. When I realized what I was doing, it became clear I should just give up on this book and move on.

It may be I don’t like the Head First approach; the free wheeling mind maps, the puzzle exercises, and the repetition of concepts are the antithesis of the dense and compact style I prefer.

It could also be that I find the full project management process as described by the PMP to be about as practical and memorable as the full software engineering process described by the RUP. A coworker in project management related a view that the PMP is a collection of tools, any of which - but not always all - might be applied to any given project. That’s certainly similar to how few people use the complete RUP, but class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and use cases are ubiquitous.

So… any aspiring project managers want to borrow a highly rated PMP book?

Reading this book on my daily commute certainly stirred up an appetite by the time I reached my destination!

The colourful speech and frank tone of Kitchen Confidential is also present in this book, and still very entertaining. However, I found the book more like a collection of short stories than one continuous piece, as it jumped from country to country, and sometimes back to a previous country.

There’s some discussion of the culture that surrounds the food, but it certainly doesn’t have the detail that he provided about professional cooking.

My favourite aspect to this book is the flair and passion for describing food, done so well with imaginative descriptions that I feel like I can almost taste it. If restaurant menus were all written with such expertise, I’d by hypnotized into always eating out!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3RGKXSI2LTX4H/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

I needed something lighter after reading Software Estimation, so I turned to my shelf to look for non-computer, non-business, non-finance related books that I had not yet read. There weren’t very many.

Lukily (as the book is on loan from a friend for about 15 months now), I found A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain. I loved his writing style in Kitchen Confidential: refreshingly direct and colourful.

I have high hopes for a similarly entertaining and colourful narrative about the cuisines and food cultures of exotic locations. I watched part of the television series by the same name, which was quite good - and the book is usually better than the video.

Name: Angel

Entry URL: Now reading: The Search by John Battelle

You didn’t like the other book?, or are you Multitasking..?

I finished the other book, but I figured I didn’t really need to do “review” or “signal” about books I’ve read. Should I?

I’m trying a system of focusing on one book at a time, and “forcing” myself to read it by putting it on my blog. So far it’s pretty good: this is my 4th book in 3 months, which is a lot better than the zero books in the 12 months previous.

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