In Magical Child, Joseph Chilton Pearce presents the idea that our current medical practices around childbirth and our education systems subvert the natural and healthy growth of our greatest human capacities. Pearce builds on the work on the French developmental psychologist Piaget to delineate five stages of human growth, outlining the "natural" biological and psychological processes that help people reach the apex of each of these stages. Unfortunately, he maintains, our modern medical birthing methods and education systems tend to work against these natural processes and trip us up far short of our true human potential. He goes on to cite the work of a number of researchers that suggest better ways of birthing, parenting, and educating.

There are some keen insights here, but unfortunately they are buried within an intellectually muddled and scientifically dishonest presentation. For example, in the introductory chapters, Pearce speaks about human development from a very materialistic (and atheistic) view of human evolution, while often in the same paragraph praising Nature the wonderful "designer" of our human growth, a very theistic view. The significance of the book's central themes -- realization one's full humanity and potential -- is very different in each of these worldviews, and Pearce avoids revealing which side of the fence he sits on. He is similarly dishonest in his use of scientific research. He likes to quote from researchers -- when they agree with his theories. Contradictory scientific evidence isnt mentioned, except in a few cases where he merely dismisses it without discussion. This is unfortunate, because it's the weighing of seemingly contractictory evidence that science has tended to make its greatest leaps. Too bad Pearce wasnt brave enough to put his own theories to that test.

As the subtitle says, this book speaks to people who have walked away from the church because they are unable to swallow its superstitions and irrelevance. As a re-examination of traditional Christian beliefs, the book is refreshing and full of insight. At the same time, by the book's end you may find yourself wondering, "OK, so where to from here?" And there is where it falls short.

The book opens with a line by line re-examination of the Nicene creed, the statement of beliefs that Christians have repeated for centuries. Spong shows how most of these contradict our ordinary understanding of the world. For example, we know that there is no "up" or "down" in the universe, so therefore there is no place that heaven could be "above." We know that the universe can be understood by laws of physics and not a machine driven by a theological Dad whom we can contact and petition through a type of wireless phone connection called prayer. And so on. Spong puts forth the thesis that this creed, which was thought to be the essential tenet of Christianity, was the attempt of people to explain, as best they could, the powerful experiences of Jesus and God. Now that we know better, Spong says, we need a new understanding. For any who have a problematic relationship with the church or who have left it altogether, hearing such ideas from an Episcopal bishop can be refreshing.

It's hard to argue with Spong's critique. It's his suggestions that fall short. As he works through the remainder of the book, reexamining traditional Christian notions of sin, prayer, salvation, and so on, his prescriptions, show the same limitations as the doctrines he is critiquing. In his discussion of prayer, for example, he acknowledges that he has never gotten much out of sitting prayer, and suggests that working with people is a form of prayer that works better for him. While the idea of prayer as an intimate conversation with God may no longer be viable, Spong overlooks the fact that all of the great spiritual traditions have extensive exhortations to practice meditation, an activity quite like prayer (and some would say identical to it). In other words, Spong's prescriptions for prayer are as limited and biased as the "official" prescriptions he is critiquing.

While this book is reassuring and thought-provoking in its way, I found myself at the end of it wishing for a broader perspective, one that can make sense of the broad variety of practices and perspectives that honest believers and seekers adhere to and wanting ideas for how to integrate them all again into the body of the church. You wont find that in this book. But it is a worthwhile place to start nonetheless.

Wealth and Democracy has two stories to tell. One is the history of booms and recessions in the US economy since the revolution. The second is the broader outline of a country's rise to global economic prominance and the decline that follows; while the boosters of the US economy would like us all to believe that the US is on top of the global economy to stay, history since the 15th century (as enacted by Spain, the Netherlands, and England) suggests we're over the top and on our way down. Through these two stories, Phillips dispels a number of economic myths that have grown popular in recent decades, particularly during the heyday of the 1990s.

Among these is the idea that economic booms benefit everyone in society (the "trickle-down" idea). On the contrary, Phillips shows that the "free market" booms since the founding of the nation have primarily benefited owners of capital, and have generally have come at the expense of the middle and lower classes, particularly during recent decades. In fact, the longest period of economic expansion (after WWII) came during the period of greatest government regulation of the economy. This leads to the second major myth he dispels: that wealth in America is created by a "free" market; in fact, Phillips documents how most booms were fueled by specific government policies and actions, and generally benefited certain segments, companies and , families who had friends in the government. On the global level, Phillips long historical view dispels the notion that the global economy is a "new economy"; in fact the present global economy has only begun to approach the global economy at the end of the 19th century that was guided by the British. Added to all of this, his final major point - that the recent shift of focus in the US economy from manufacturing to finance parallels the English, Dutch, and Spanish shifts to finance as their economies faltered - is chilling.

The diversity of these points illustrates the one flaw in the book, which is that it has too many stories to tell. The first few chapters provide a broad overview of his theses and a historical telling of the story. The subsequent chapters tell a similar story from a topical point of view; for example, one chapter documents how government policy has been a prime engine of wealth creation; another focuses on technology. These chapters reiterate the original story from different angles, but by the latter third of the book the points have been understood and the repetition grows tedious. Some may also also object to the extensive presentation of data in charts and tables that fill each chapter. These also can get excessive, but in the end I would argue they are necessary, given the intense emotions surrounding the economic ideologies he is challenging. (The reviews on this site offer a good illustration of just how much people insist on clinging to this ideology in the fact of facts.) These objections aside, this book provides more hard evidence from reliable sources on this important subject than any other book I have seen, and should not be missed by anyone who cares about the future of the American economy and government.

Bossidy and Charan's book has a simplicity in its advice that is a breath of fresh air after much of the new economy hype that has filled the bookshelves in the past few years. The book argues that the primary reason for much of the poor corporate performance we've seen in the past few years (outside of outright dishonest companies like Enron, WorldCom, and their ilk) has not been muddled strategy, lack of innovation, or an ever more rapidly changing marketplace but poor execution. Conversely, they argue that great execution has been one of the cornerstones for the great corporate success, such as General Electric. (Jack Welch looms large in the background here.) And good execution is a lot more commonsensical than you might think: it is merely insuring that corporate strategy is well-conceived and solidly grounded in the company's human and operational capacities.

This is a difficult subject for a book, because there is no cookie-cutter methodology the authors could provide that could help you drill deeply into your own company's strategy, staffing, and operational plans and really root out the strengths and the weaknesses of them. Good execution, they argue, has its roots in asking good probing questions, questions that will be different in each situation. The authors include a number of general questions in each area to help begin this probing, but that's about as far as a book can take it. The bulk of the book, though is anecdotes illustrating how this has worked either well or poorly at other companies. If you're looking for clear-cut instructions, this is likely to be disappointing.

What is most interesting about this book is how well it dovetails with Jim Collins' recent bestseller "Good to Great." Collins' book describes the general patterns to successful corporate change (or execution). Bossidy and Charan's book describes some of the nuts and bolts needed to follow that pattern, from styles of leadership, getting the right people in the right jobs, doing honest assessments of a company's capacity, and then working toward goals with great focus. If you enjoyed Collins' book, this book can help you figure out better how to make great execution happen in your own company.

This book provides an inspiring catalog of the many ways that entrepreneurs have turned the scarcity of natural resources and threats to the environment into successful business advantages. There are endless examples of how people have achieved success reducing energy use and waste, creating technologies to create clean water, more natural building materials and urban designs, and healthier food, to name just a few. If you're turned off by the amorality of business in the 1990s and the idea of growth at whatever price, this book can help instill faith in the resorative potential of business. As such, it's a good introduction to sustainability.

The book's weakness is that it implies that with a little greening here you can have it all. It's long on the "natural" but very short on considering what kind of capitalism will be necessary to make our economy truly sustainable. As co-author Paul Hawken admitted in the introduction of an earlier book ("The Ecology of Commerce"), almost no business presently operating is truly sustainable. As economist Herman Daly has pointed out, even with increased resource efficiency, northern nations still consume too many resources too inefficiently for the world to accept much more growth, a sobering thought as China begins to gear up its automotive industry. To be sustainable, we will have to accept that the world economy must live within limits, which represents a true change of paradigm and not the incremental improvement that Natural Capitalism implies is sufficient. Without accepting such limits, many of the good ideas presented in this book (such as fuel cells, lightweight vehicles made of kevlar or other materials, to name just two examples) will likely remain uneconomical and unutilized.

This book takes some interesting insights from economist Joseph Schumpeter (who coined the term "creative destruction") and leadership expert Ron Heifetz and then goes on to make overly broad generalizations from them, supported by an extensive but questionable data analysis. The authors go on at length about the size and scope of the McKinsey corporate database that provides much of the backbone for the book's conclusions, but anyone who studies excellence or best-practices knows that you dont learn much about them by studying large, general samples; in fact, such samples are designed to rule out the exceptions. (And I'll just overlook the fact that Enron is one of the exceptional performers they highlight.)

At bottom, the book fails to deliver on either of the promises in its subtitle. The primary reason seems to be that little of it is drawn from practical experience with exceptional companies. Despite its scope, the McKinsey database doesn't really answer, from a management point of view, why most companies have underperformed. (Although less systematically presented, you can get more wisdom from a practitioner's book like Tom Kelly's "The Art of Innovation.") This is most obvious as the book moves into suggestions for "how to change" these companies: neither the suggested methodology for strategic planning nor the successful case examples provide anything more than some basic, general ideas that have been better covered elsewhere in the organizational development and management literature.

The subtitle also suggests that the book presents a refutation of the arguments for corporate sustainability that Collins and Porras gave in "Built to Last". Interestingly, Foster and Kaplan disdain to address that book directly or even cite it, except in a buried footnote. This is unfortunate because they present data on some of Collins' and Porras' profiled companies that suggest they have performed far more poorly than "Built to Last" would lead you to believe; it would have been helpful to understand who was overstating what. Collins and Porras also stress in detail that built-to-last companies "preserve the core / stimulate progress"; it is not clear that "creative destruction" differs from this in any significant way. In sum, the issue of how to create long-term value will still be a big question when you've finished reading this book.

It is interesting to note, as the authors are current and former McKinsey consultants, that a majority of the underperformers in their database are McKinsey clients. If these companies failed to turn around after investing in McKinsey advice, what is the likelihood that anyone else will do it from ideas they got reading a book?

Daly, more than any other economist or writer on sustainability, makes clear the fallacies of traditional free-market thinking. The book illustrates very clearly why economic growth cannot be sustainable in a finite world. (Although he doesnt use the metaphor -- I'll borrow it from Edward Abbey -- the same logic explains why "sustainable" cell growth in humans is called "cancer.") Daly argues that traditional economic theory is mainly useful in only one of the three core areas of economy (the optimal price and allocation of scarce resources) and does not address in any meaningful way two other issues -- the distribution of resources and determining the overall scale of the economy that can be sustained within the biosphere. Particularly interesting is the essay on economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which describes all of the tenets of traditional economic theory that become untenable merely when one accepts the fact that the second law of thermodynamics (the law on increasing entropy) must apply to an economy just as it applies to the biological and physical world.

What makes Daly effective as a writer is the calm humility of his intellect. Economics has practically become a religion in our society (witness the dogmatic reviews of political/economic books on this site). However, unlike other economists, who get shrill and polemical when their dogma is challenged, Daly is willing to consider possible holes in his arguments, opponents' counterarguments, and unknowns. Of course, he shreds most counterarguments in his calm, polite way, but after reading other economists the openness is refreshing.

My one complaint is the disjointed nature of the book. Although certain themes run throughout each of the seven sections, some of the pieces were originally written as separate essays, and it shows. However, given the clarity of the writing (even on very technical subjects such as Soddy's views on the nature of money) that is ultimately forgivable.

Listening to Prozac is the best kind of nonfiction book: a book that meditates on large questions by focusing a laser eye on a a more specialized topic, in this case depression and its treatment. Kramer probes deeply into the symptoms and physiology of depression and its treatment with drugs and other means, but without letting his narrative run aground in technical muck. It's this constant probing that allow him to explore much more broad questions about modern American attitudes toward the personality, moods, and mental health, which are the real heart and soul of this book. People interested in better understanding depression will definitely benefit from this, but so will anyone with an interest in psychology at the close of the twentieth century.

Over the years, New York Times reporter Tom Friedman has earned a reputation for his crisp and engaging writing and his ability to present the complex world events in ways that are easy to understand. If you're looking for an introduction to issues involved in the globalization of commerce, this is one of the best books on the market for it. Friendman's descriptions of things like the "electronic herd" of global capital investment and his McDonald's theory of international conflict bring a lot of sense to an otherwise confusing landscape of issues.

This strength of the book is also its limitation. Friedman is a clear writer because he paints with a broad brush. There is a strong bias at work here, but Friedman tends to try to keep hidden both his bias and points of debate that would contradict his theses. For example, he argues that market capitalism is now the one and only way to participate in the global economy, ignoring that there are several distinct flavors of "market capitalism" (US, Japanese, and European, for example) with very different rules and very different outcomes. Reading Friedman, one might assume that the Asian tigers had achieved their success by following the US model (which is the laissez-faire approach also advocated by the World Bank), while in fact they achieved robust growth through an approach more or less like that followed by the Japanese, which involved a combination of protectionism, currency management, and mandated savings. Friedman uses the 1997 Asian economic meltdown to argue that this Japanese-style approach is no longer valid and that global capital investment will not return until they better conform to the financial market transparency typical of the US. During the current slump, however, capital has fled from the US back to many of these economies because of their performance and not because of their transparency.

The question with globalization isnt whether it's "good" or "bad," but whether and how it should be managed. If you're looking for a more in-depth discussion of these issues and a more honest revelation of the author's biases, there are better books available, such as William Greider's "One World, Ready or Not." But this book isn't a bad place to get your feet wet.

As Ken Wilber's oeuvre has expanded, each new book becomes less a work unto itself and instead tends to illuminate one or another aspect of Wilber's broad worldview. Even with that in mind, this book fails to live up to either the "vision" described in the subtitle or Wilber's usual standard. Although the discussion on Beck and Cowan's Spiral Dynamics greatly enhances the four-quadrant holarchy (and greatly improves on Beck and Cowan's original), the section on politics only skims the surface of the possibilities and the section on business illuminates nothing, merely namedropping business writers who may, perhaps, someday give us a little integral vision. This is a shame because the spiral dynamics/holarchy discussion is his his most clear and concise presentation of it. If you havent read Wilber before, skim the early chapters in your bookstore and then pick up "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" or "A Theory of Everything" to get a real glimpse of the rest.