This book sounds like a great idea that is shoddily executed.
The New York Times says: Mr. Akst’s attempt to touch on the whole web of influences on human behavior, however, leads him frequently to veer off the central subject of self-control and flit from one marginally related topic to another. In one sentence he refers to the role mobs play in lynchings and in the very next he is discussing how ovulating women tend to wear more makeup and jewelry at a singles bar.
The result is a laundry basket of a book that includes studies on happiness, a disquisition on the virtues and drawbacks of laissez-faire governance versus the welfare state, and the preference of the rich and powerful for masochism over sadism.
Mr. Akst’s prose has its own pitfalls. The book reads as if he wrote it with a collection of quotations in his lap. After a while you feel as if you are stuck sitting next to a shameless name dropper on a long transcontinental flight on which the “fasten seat belt” sign stays on. Nor is his analysis helped by a cloyingly informal tone that refers to advocates of reason as “a bunch of old farts,” or asks “just what the heck we mean by” self-control.
