The Reader

I purchased this book a long time ago, but I was hesitant to read it due to its thickness. However, I finally finished reading it today. The scope covered by this book is as wide as the author’s diverse academic background, and the level of knowledge is deep. If I were to describe the book in one word, it would be ‘elegant.’ Beginning with stories about modernist artists from around 1900 in Vienna, Austria, notably Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka and the early famous medical scientists exploring neuroscience, including Freud, this book explores the human unconscious and psychology. It also describes in detail neuroscience and how it relates to emotions and reactions that beholders feel when they see art. In particular, it offers many intriguing insights into visual perception and the theory of mind. Although the content is not easy to read due to its abstract nature, it contains many important research results and contents in cognitive science. After reading this book, I...

In this book published in 2021, the author tried to find answers to the questions raised: who gets the power, why do people corrupt after gaining power, and what should we do to prevent such corruption? Personally, I read this book to understand more why authorities that I’ve met or heard acted like that. As it is not an easy subject, I couldn’t get one obvious answer, but the author coherently tried to give answers from various aspects encompassing evolutionary, psychological, and historical perspectives. Interesting anecdotes, interviews, and academic pieces of evidence altogether help us get a glimpse of the ‘true or core answer’, but still makes us feel ‘couldn’t get it done’. Nonetheless, I consider that this book can be the possible best answer to this complex topic. It is worth reading with only relevant knowledge in various fields and interesting stories presented in this book. It is often said that power corrupts, but according to this book, people who are attracted to power a...

Several years ago, when I worked at the national forensic psychiatric hospital, I read this book for the first time. As I stopped reading it after reading two-thirds of it, I read again from the beginning. Now, I became to like this book more than my first reading. As a renowned neurocriminologist, the author deals with the biosocial causes of violent criminals and how to prevent such crimes based on scientific findings. A variety of case examples and proven scientific knowledge are well-organized and woven to convey the major topic. So, the author’s provocative idea regarding the future national crime prevention program in the last chapter doesn’t sound like science fiction or daydreaming. The author’s future imaginary prevention programs named “the LOMBROSO (Legal Offensive on Murder: Brain Research Operation for the Screening of Offenders)” (which seems to be named after Cesare Lombroso, the founder of biological criminology) and “the NCSP (the National Child Screening Program)” loo...

This book reveals wonderfully with a mixture of enough scientific pieces of evidence and personal stories why hidden factors outside a hospital are important to human health. As social beings, others, namely community and neighborhood, deeply influence us. A sense of belonging and interconnectedness is critical to our mental health. Long-lasted loneliness and isolation make persons vulnerable to mental illness. Exaggerated, endured stress responses accompanied by stressful daily lives can make persons ill. So, the author maintains that kindness and compassion for others matter and can make humans healthier and happier. According to this book, humans are 99.9% genetically similar. In that regard, we all are quite similar in genetic make-ups, but some people overestimate racial and ethnic differences. However, race is arbitrary, a sort of social construct, rather than a scientific one, the author argues. Is our hierarchical social structure reflecting the historical and cultural inequity...

 I bought this book ten years ago when the author became famous to many Koreans as the first Asian woman tenured at Harvard Law School. I heard through an interview that she was excellent at piano and ballet and read many books regardless of the school curriculum during school days. As I always have been interested in people who achieved academically, I first bought a translated Korean version and then an original English version. After reading the initial part, I left it unattended for a long time, and recently I read it to the end. As expected, she was a "well-rounded" and talented woman in the liberal arts. Highly educated, resourceful parents, focused on giving opportunities to their children, and American education, which must have given more chances to a gifted person than the 80s' & 90s' Korean education, seem to have played a positive role in her academic success. In addition, her qualities, including the ability to make friends easily and maintain a close...

This memoir illustrates vividly what he had to go through since childhood to earn a Ph.D. degree at Stanford University, physics department in around 2000. This book begins with a story of his mother and father’s physical fight at night and clearing out with mama and older sister to somewhere the next morning. As his mother always had to work and was not a caring or devoted type of person, his sister nearly took care of him. He was a sort of neglected, poor black kid. Even with a genius IQ and talent for physics, he could not get a real chance to pursue an academic career in physics until he reenrolled at Tougaloo college. At Tougaloo, he met two white professors, Dr. Teal and Dr. McGinnis, both of whom recognized his talent and tried to help him learn science in-depth, get research experience, furthermore dream an academic path in a prestigious graduate school. At Stanford, compared with other graduate students, he was least academically prepared and had to take two years of undergrad...

  It is a well and clearly written book, so I could finish reading it quite fast. As a renowned expert on the dynamics and influences of the social network, the author conveyed his major experiment findings and relevant important concepts interestingly and concisely. Unlike simple information transfer or viral infection (‘simple contagion’), meaningful social changes or innovations (‘complex contagion’) have to overcome people’s inertia to keep the status quo, so the author mentioned that such social changes start in the periphery of the networks, against our expectations. Good innovations require isolation or protection from the skepticism of non-adopters (“countervailing influences”), and also need reinforcement from surrounding people (“relevances”), which require redundancies of connectedness or clustering. It is said that the periphery or outer rim of social networks fulfills such conditions that social changes are actually initiated by people in the periphery, not by hig...