Book review: Made to Stick: Why some ideas stick and others don't, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Reviewed by Michael S. Hopkins, a contributing editor of Inc. magazine

On April 29, 1999, an article appeared in the Indiana Daily Student headlined "Indiana U. Senior Gains New Perspective on Life." You'll recognize the story. It profiled a 425-pound college kid who cut his weight in half by eating fast food. His name was Jared.

Part of the reason you know the story is that Subway – the place Jared got his veggie and turkey subs every day – turned it into an ad campaign that transformed Jared into an unlikely celebrity. (Possibly you can still picture him in his "after" version, stretching the 60-inch waist of his "before" pants between two widespread hands.)

But the Subway campaign alone doesn't explain the nearly viral phenomenon it triggered. There have been countless other ad campaigns since Jared's debuted, and none of them imprinted an unknown college student on the nation's memory the way Subway's did. Nor did many of them so swiftly and lastingly get their message across. ("Our food, though fast, is actually so healthy it can help you lose weight.")

Why not? What was it about Jared's message that made it – and him – stick?

Now, thanks to Made to Stick, we know. Coauthors (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath – a Stanford Business School professor and an education entrepreneur respectively – spent a decade disassembling and trying to understand the inner workings of memorable, persuasive ideas, no matter what kind of packages they came in.

They studied political speeches, urban legends, news reports, management directives, and marketing messages like Subway's – not to mention culture-crossing proverbs, the various fables of Aesop, and the many soups of chicken (for the soul).

It didn't matter whether the ideas themselves were good or bad, just that they'd "stuck." (Not only is the Great Wall of China not the sole man-made structure visible from space; it isn't visible from space at all. And still...)

What the Heaths discovered was that the stickiest ideas, regardless of intrinsic merit, had a lot in common. Or, more accurately, the ways they were presented had a lot in common.

For a full text, go to http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0123/p15s02-bogn.html

New Book Report: Power, Faith, and Fantasy/ America in the Middle East, 1776 to the presen, by Michael, B. Oren

Power, Faith ,and Fantasy: American in the middle East, 1776 to present, written by Michael B. Oren, is a good book to read if you want to know the epic of the Middle East relation to the United States. Around the time of the War of Independence, America’s main contact with the Middle East consisted in trading Caribbean rum for Turkish opium.

New Book Report: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent conspiracy to spread American imperialism? A little of both, according to this absorbing study, but, the author concludes, it is mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one's interests well. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Weiner musters extensive archival research and interviews with top-ranking insiders, including former CIA chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, to present the agency's saga as an exercise in trying to change the world without bothering to understand it. Hypnotized by covert action and pressured by presidents, the CIA, he claims, wasted its resources fomenting coups, assassinations and insurgencies, rigging foreign elections and bribing political leaders, while its rare successes inspired fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. Meanwhile, Weiner contends, its proper function of gathering accurate intelligence languished. With its operations easily penetrated by enemy spies, the CIA was blind to events in adversarial countries like Russia, Cuba and Iraq and tragically wrong about the crucial developments under its purview, from the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism to the absence of Iraqi WMDs. Many of the misadventures Weiner covers, at times sketchily, are familiar, but his comprehensive survey brings out the persistent problems that plague the agency. The result is a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy. (from Publisher Weekly)

New Book Report: "The Death of Progressive Education: how teachers lost control of the classroom" Roy Lowe, 2007

A new book by Roy Lowe has just published by Routledge, 2007, on education. The title is "The Death of Progressive Education: how teachers lost control of the classroom".

This is the first book to take a long, hard look at the changes that have taken place in the classroom over the last thirty years. Roy Lowe examines the rise of child-centred approaches to teaching in the period following the Second World War and then traces the process by which the role of the classroom teacher has been almost completely transformed since major debates on what should be taught and how it should be taught during the 1960s.
Just some of the questions raised -and answered - by this original and freshly researched examination of what has gone on in our classrooms include:

• Who were the progressives and what influence did they have on what went on in the classroom?
• How widespread was the teaching revolution that many claimed was taking place during the 1950s and 1960s?
• What exactly were the changes in classroom practice at that time?
• Why is it that the coming of a new politics of education during the 1970s and 1980s was able to have such a massive impact on classroom practice and on the role of the teacher?

This study of recent educational practice and policy should be essential reading for anyone concerned with what our schools should look like into the 21st century.