Good Habits, Bad Habits by Wood AND Embrace Your Weird by Day

GOOD HABITS, BAD HABITS by Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California, Wendy Wood is all about “The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick.” Wood divides her work into three parts (How We Really Are, The Three Bases of Habit Formation, and Special Cases, Big Opportunities and the World Around Us). She writes in an accessible manner, opening with an anecdote about a cousin trying to lose weight, and then explains some of the obstacles to success, including the idea that “we act out of habit [approximately forty percent of the time] without having to make a decision to do so.” The second part of Wood’s text, which deals with context, repetition and reward, is really quite informative. For example, Wood discusses the decline in smoking in America, noting that knowledge of the dangers and willpower (desire to quit) were often not enough until regulations and environment (e.g., limited advertising, fewer vending machines and more non-smoking areas) became prevalent. However, I think I like best her short “useful story” at the book’s end which is titled “How to Stop Looking at your Phone So Often” – it provides a wonderful application of her ideas and was recently highlighted in The Los Angeles Times’ review of this book. Wood also includes extensive notes, a lengthy bibliography and an index, all of which may interest our Psych student researchers. GOOD HABITS, BAD HABITS received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was named one of “10 books to read in October” by The Washington Post.

EMBRACE YOUR WEIRD by professional actress Felicia Day was actually recommended recently by another member of the Library staff. In this “part guided journal, part workbook” Day encourages her readers to “Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity.”  Early on, she encourages readers to write “I am the greatest thing since Swiss cheese” over and over and to REALLY believe it.  She encourages her readers to let go of self-consciousness by keeping the process of working through the book private – and offers a quick exercise about adjectives and dancing to explain why. I think that Psych classes and advisories will find this book amusing and quirky, but also perceptive and helpful. There could be some really great prompts for journaling and introspection. Potentially, Creative Writers classes could also have fun and learn to “loosen-up” with this text. Day writes humorously and yet offers some serious suggestions to unlock our weird, creative voices, “combining the inventory we already have in our brains in new and interesting ways.” There is an entire chapter called Playtime! And another labeled Quests; as Day says, “What do you have to lose?”

The Price We Pay by Marty Makary

THE PRICE WE PAY by Marty Makary is subtitled “What Broke American Health Care—and How to Fix It.” Makary has long been concerned with health care costs and helping consumers to be more knowledgeable. He is a best-selling author (Unaccountable, 2012), surgeon, and a professor of Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In THE PRICE WE PAY, Makary divides his chapters into three broad sections titled Gold Rush, Improving Wisely, and Redesigning Health Care. In the first, he looks at issues like “Two Americas” where he describes situations for individual patients such as the horrific one for Jennifer and her husband, young parents from Carlsbad, New Mexico where the hospital repeatedly sued them for non-payment and then garnished wages even though many of the costs were associated with an infection caused by the hospital itself. He also profiles Mary Washington Hospital, serving a community of about 25,000 in Fredericksburg, Virginia; over the last five years, that hospital has filed 24,200 lawsuits! He and his team documented the pattern wherein American workers (especially those in retail like Walmart, Lowe’s, Kroger, etc.) with health insurance “made too little money to afford inflated hospital bills but made too much to qualify for Medicaid.”

In the second section of THE PRICE WE PAY, Makary focuses on specific issues like unnecessary C-sections for women in labor or overtreatment with drug prescriptions and devotes one chapter to the opioid epidemic. Finally, he uses the last section of his book to explore disruption in the industry, to look more specifically at health insurance, and to offer a concluding call to action and more transparency in the face of price gouging and “ugly” billing procedures. Although Makary does an excellent job of outlining issues and abuses, his proposed solution seems to rely mostly on medical doctors policing a system that will be hard to change. THE PRICE WE PAY contains several pages of notes and an index; this new title received a starred review from Booklist.

Wildhood by Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers

WILDHOOD by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers is subtitled “The Epic Journey from Adolescence to Adulthood in Humans and Other Animals.” And what an intriguing read it is!  Readers can explore peer-pressure in salmon (who knew?) and courtship behavior in humpback whales, plus many more examples from the animal kingdom. The authors (Natterson-Horowitz is a visiting professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and Bowers is a science journalist) previously collaborated on the New York Times bestseller Zoobiquity. In WILDHOOD, they use chapters divided into four parts representing key life skills (Safety, Status, Sex, and Self-reliance) in order to discuss parallels with our own species. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers write about impulsivity and the “teenage brain” as well as social hierarchies and “association with high status animals.” Truly fascinating, their writing is scientific, but accessible and of interest across disciplines like Psych, Science, and Kinetic Wellness classes. The authors also raise issues that some Junior Theme students are already exploring, too, like the impact for humans of having to learn these life skills both in a real world and a virtual one. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers recently published an essay, called “Adolescents Go Wild – And Not Just Humans” in The Wall Street Journal (available online at school) which gives a brief overview of their research.

The text itself includes a glossary of terms, almost fifty pages of detailed notes and a helpful index. WILDHOOD received starred reviews from Booklist (“Teens might like reading about their counterparts in the animal kingdom”) and Publishers Weekly. Find it on our shelves soon!