Practical Wisdom: The Right Way To Do the Right Thing by Barry Schwartz
This pop science book differs from most of its kind in that it relies heavily on the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, specifically Aristotle. Basically, it’s a treatise on (like the subtitle says) how to do the right thing in the right way–how to be wise.
Wisdom is one of those things where you don’t even realize how much you lack until you’re old enough to be a little wise. Who wouldn’t want to read a book that helped them make the right decisions? I did. This is exactly the kind of book I like to read: scientific, mostly psychology and sociology, with another discipline or two (ethics and philosophy).
I can’t say this book struck me as poorly written. Each chapter leads neatly into the next, and there are plenty of anecdotes to keep it from being too dry. That said I found myself unable to finish it. I got about halfway through and decided I’d given it enough of a shot. One of the problems is that the authors seem to have read the exact same books I’ve already read, so nothing felt new. The other problem is that I couldn’t really get a good handle on what it was -about-, so it felt like a bunch of ordinary stories emphasizing and proving uncontroversial points. Everything seemed pretty obvious, and I didn’t get what they were trying to prove.
If you haven’t read a lot of books in the philosophy/ethics/sociology genre, this might be an okay book for you. It wasn’t good for me.
