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To call a novel about mathematics "formulaic" may be a kind of praise, but I mean that the story feels something like a setup to me. To say more would be a spoiler and though mathematics loves a spoiler, novel readers do not. For me, the two most interesting parts, the non-formulaic parts, were the use of beans to prove a number theory hypothesis (was this an original idea?) and the claim that Ramanujan thought Goldbach's conjecture was ultimately false and would fail for a large enough even number. I tried to confirm the latter with Google and failed but I like the idea and hope it's true.

I seem to recall that the continuum hypothesis was in fact proved undecidable; please correct me if I'm wrong. My own favorite unsolved famous problem is proving P unequal to NP and I actually try to do it occasionally. Attempting such problems teaches one a lot about the nature of mathematics and the psychology of how it feels to try and do what no one has ever done. In my opinion, this is more than I got from this novel which touches on those subjects.

In China, the UK, and the USA, one can get CoViD, but if you live in the UK, you can also be diagnosed with PDA which a USian cannot. What kind of disease is only available in select locations?

PDA is short for Pathological Demand Avoidance and is considered (in Britain, at least) part of the Autism spectrum. If it's still not clear, one with PDA finds it difficult or impossible to submit to what is experienced as a demand (even if it might be meant as a request or a suggestion). As you might guess, this is the kind of diagnosis that explains to a parent why their child refuses to obey, replacing the label of stubborn, recalcitrant, or naughty, and in the process removes the blame the child would be given and indicates that punishment is the wrong solution.

Harry Thompson, who can claim PDA among his diagnoses, tells us that it has a neurological basis and is independent of one's past experience. Nature not nurture. The demand to see it this way is one I am (pathologically?) resisting so I googled and found no compelling evidence but much cultural agreement. We want to leave behind the previous cultural agreement that Autism was caused by "refrigerator mothers" (i.e. bad nurture) but I am resistant to the demands of cultural agreements in general. I think Harry would understand this impulse of mine.

Harry says he resists labels: "To brand oneself with restrictive labels is to ultimately restrict oneself altogether." but he bows to the tyranny of neurodeterminism, a word I just made up to mean the reduction of who a person is to their brain. At least he starts off that way but later on he says: "The person doing the labelling [British spelling] may be oblivious to the fact that it’s the very environment which is holding these symptoms in place." He recognizes that all his language--the whole book we're reading--exists in a context. Even the diagnosis PDA is an expedient that can be tossed aside when in his "natural habitat" and he simply becomes "a person expressing himself in the way he feels most competent, in an environment he feels most comfortable."

Most of us, when we're born, experience the world as something we're eager to join. We don't question our culture or our gender but feel we belong in it, pushing away any doubts. Others, though we know it's the only game in town, remain hesitant or suspicious. I always imagined autism as an outright refusal, fleeing sensory input, rejecting even language, with the so-called treatments being ways to force it on the child "for their own good." Seen this way, all autism is PDAish.

For Freud, it's all [b:Civilization and Its Discontents|357636|Civilization and Its Discontents|Sigmund Freud|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438544596l/357636.SY75.jpg|848942] with that failure of contentment resulting in neurosis. Harry imagines some kind of environment that he doesn't need to rebel against, but is that really possible?

Perhaps we don't need to address each other in the form of demands. Marshall Rosenberg suggests this solution in [b:Non-Violent Communication Training Course|3692070|Non-Violent Communication Training Course|Marshall B. Rosenberg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/50x75-a91bf249278a81aabab721ef782c4a74.png|69460]. Meanwhile, others manage their intimacy by artificially creating environments of demand and submission, known as BDSM.

I, diagnosed normal, find much of Harry's ways of thinking perfectly understandable, even though he describes his brain as radically different from that of normal people in the context of this book. I agree with Harry that what we're dealing with are not really disorders but differing ways of being human. All psychological pathologies are social constructs anyway. The formulation of this one in particular as pathological from the standpoint of a presumed normal point of view is unfortunate but predictable, and yet I still can see PDA as a useful classification that will resonate with those to whom it applies and their care-givers, as long as we recognize its not a disease.

Even the demands of writing a book seem to have been a challenge for him and somewhere after the first half, he sort of relaxes and decides to just say whatever he feels like, though politely so we can avoid being triggered by the demand of his point of view. Then he has his mother write an ending to transition us gently back into the "normal" world. I have to wonder what his father, a. k. a. "the beast", would have said on this occasion.

He often chooses some infrequently used words when more common ones would do; e.g. lachrymose, adamantine, vicissitude; which read autodidact to me, or maybe Asperger. I have to wonder how someone less intelligent with the same underlying "kind of mind" would have made it through the kind of situations that Harry has had to live through. I also wonder if he has "aged out" of those meltdowns he documents. Aren't the late teens the age when males are statistically the most violent?

Note: If you can't tolerate the demands of reading an actual book--you could always watch some of Harry's youtube videos. There's a large overlap of stories between this book and what he has uploaded to the internet.

I flew to the Soviet Union. On the plane (Aeroflot) the seat belt didn't work. I told the stewardess. She shrugged. There was a fly buzzing around in the plane. The airport we landed at looked like an army base but it's just that, as a Westerner, I expected airports to look fancy. The Soviet Union was no frills.

Rosalinda is a no frills soviet mother. If she seems harsh at times, it's because life is harsh if no attempt is made to dress it up. If she's cruel, it's because life is cruel. Why else would her daughter be born ugly and stupid?

Some readers would be quick to judge Rose, but she is our narrator and we can't continue without her. You may think she's incapable of self-reflection but when the granddaughter she worships suggests she's evil, she doesn't dismiss the thought out of hand. She asks her husband if it might be true. When he can no longer avoid answering he says "Of course not!". The next day he leaves her.

This isn't a story about good and evil. Rose believes in God, but the God she believes in is like an uncaring soviet bureaucrat. At one point she abandons Him as requiring too much of her.

We read this novel because we like seeing the world through Rose's eyes. It's new and unfamiliar. Plain old greed or cruelty or desperation would be boring. This book has taken me somewhere I've never been before. And how many of you have been to the Soviet Union?

The Donald we meet in this work is the same one we already knew well from the other tell all books and the exceptionally leaky White House. The two I'd reviewed on Goodreads were by [b:Fear: Trump in the White House|41012533|Fear Trump in the White House|Bob Woodward|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1534660010l/41012533.SY75.jpg|63991585] and [b:Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House|36595101|Fire and Fury Inside the Trump White House|Michael Wolff|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1514994130l/36595101.SY75.jpg|58345679]. Both present an incompetent, oblivious man who is obsessed with his own worth and image and not interested in the fate of the nation except for how that might reflect upon him. All the while, those around him scrambled to build him up and try to mitigate the damage from his worst oversteps.

(If you believe there's such a thing as spoilers for non-fiction, you should probably stop reading this review now!)

What this book adds is that he's lived that way long before becoming President. In addition to further insider revelations (e.g. he paid someone to take the SAT exams for him), we have an intimate observer with a PhD in clinical psychology showing us the tragedy of how he became that way, and that his apparent disregard of others is often, in reality, intentional sadism. Living in a time where so many believe aberrant behavior is a function of chemical imbalance, it's refreshing to be able to see the underlying family dynamics that lead to dysfunction.

In many ways, the other members of Donald's family are like him: one-dimensional manipulators going through the motions of performing the rituals of family closeness (gift-giving, holiday celebrations, etc.), but for whom loyalty, money, and pleasing Fred Sr. are all that is important. And the closer one stands to Fred Sr., the more soulless one becomes.

Originally, Donald's older brother, the author's father Fred Jr. (always called Freddy), stood closest. He had the totality of his father's attention, but only because he was slated to be the heir of Fred's empire. Freddy was not only named after him, but got the brunt of his control and abuse. Fred controlled every aspect of his eldest son's life, ignoring all his siblings, especially Freddy's sister Maryanne, who had the misfortune to be born female. When their mother, Elizabeth, took ill for a year, the siblings had pretty much no parents at all. Donald bullied his younger brother Robert, and Freddy was unable to get him to stop. Their mother admitted she couldn't control Donald and eventually Fred sent him to military school.

Freddy wished for a life of his own. He was interested in boating and aviation but his father insisted he fulfill his assigned role. Unable to take the pressure, he tried to break away but failed and was subsequently punished for his disloyalty by being replaced by Donald as the new heir to the Trump empire. Fred Sr. liked Donald's out of control audacity and used him as sort of a proxy, financially supporting anything he tried and giving him credit where none was due. Freddy, now the designated failure and object of family scorn, took his solace in drinking heavily, eventually dying in his early 40s. Donald, propped up by his father, believed his own hype that his successes were his own doing and that there was no downside to making mistakes since his father was always there to bail him out.

A dysfunctional family's interactions, everyone going through the motions of caring about each other when it's obvious they don't, everything playing out under the control of a wealthy patriarch, much of whose success was itself the result of political connections and outright fraud, would make a great movie or TV series but it's actually the recent history of the United States. Can we trust the source? Or is this "fake news"? Mary certainly has scores to settle since her father Freddy's branch of the family was punished for their father's disloyalty. Some will believe she has fallen for the liberal agenda, but is it a political point of view that, for example, separating children from their parents and putting them in cages is wrong? Perhaps the actual division isn't conservative vs. liberal but psychopathy vs. humanity. That Mary takes a side in such a conflict isn't bias, but compassion.

The Donald she depicts doesn't contradict what other insiders have already revealed to us, but Ms. Trump adds new details. Where before, others have told us that Donald was a poor businessman, Mary puts it in perspective and shows us how Fred conspired to create the myth of his son's deal making prowess. She dispels the myth that Donald was some kind of genius to manipulate the media and gain a political following based on xenophobia and racial and cultural divisiveness, pointing out that it wasn't a technique at all. If it hadn't worked, it would have been game over because that is the only way he knows how to be. And she tells us the origin story, not of a super-villain, but of an abuse victim turned abuser, a psychological phenomenon that has long been well established.

The book is sourced, fact-checked and indexed for easy reference. There's an "acknowledgements" section, which I only point out because the family creed is that one should never acknowledge others, but take all the credit for oneself.

Is the human race worth preserving? I go back and forth on this one. When I read [b:The Three-Body Problem|20518872|The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)|Liu Cixin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1415428227l/20518872.SY75.jpg|25696480] I sided with the invading aliens. In this book, chapters alternate between sides and I sided with each alternately but I was not excited about how the humans turned out after centuries of humanness. Ms. Kern was probably right to wish a do over though I'm not clear how this nanovirus can do all the tricks claimed for it. Hard to see a virus as the good guys during a pandemic.

But if evolution is really just trial and error, I can't see how you can speed that up significantly. And then these viruses become some way of recognizing kinship, but the humans already had that when they started and you can see how they turned out.

So, some interesting ideas with the ants and the chemicals and the alternate technologies but underneath the usual themes, even if done better than the average space opera.

The humans got to live a long time by sleeping through most of it, but the spiders, instead of living a long time just had the same names as their ancestors? And we readers just treat them as if they're the same spiders they're named after. It kinda worked but I think it's weird.

3.5 stars rounded up to 4 because it ended better than it could have (though it really was too long).

Why not invest a minute to be happier? Because that's not really what is being offered--that's just the marketing. If we were really doing science, we should follow up with the actual time it would take and statistics on how many readers of this book actually changed their lives

I started reading this for the dubious reason of wanting to see what another author I was reviewing recommended. I'm not an unhappy person, nor a wildly happy one--I'm not really sure what the abstraction "happiness" means even though others are comfortable giving an exact number from 1 to 10. I'd probably be happier if I were one of those others. I'd think less and smile more.

Also, I'm not eager to change anything about myself. One would think the author could understand why. He cites research that people who won the lottery didn't become happier. (Let's ignore for the moment that their experiment didn't control for people who wouldn't ever play the lottery--scientists who understand that it's a tax on those who are bad at math.) My take away from the experiment wasn't the official one--that an influx of cash doesn't create happiness--it was that that people are wrong about what they imagine will make them happy (e.g. winning money). And yet this book regularly assumes the reader knows in advance how they want to change or how they will feel about it afterwards. What about "Be careful what you wish for"?

Since he early on quotes from a Woody Allen movie, let me do the same. In Annie Hall, a happy couple accounts for their success with both people saying "I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say." These people are his ideal readership (or would be but they're already happy.) The author doesn't seem to believe that people are complicated--just misinformed on the science.

In one of the first experiments he writes about, the data shows that nursing home residents given a plant to care for reported themselves happier (and lived longer--a rare example of objective data) than those given plants that would be cared for by the staff. I assumed his conclusion would be that an experience of caring makes one happier, but no--it was that giving people more control over their lives makes them happier.
This is science?

How about that attitude of gratitude? (And does repeating those rhyming words really help matters?) I imagine feeling pure unadulterated gratitude must feel great. I have to imagine because for me, gratitude is usually mixed with a host of other feelings. Am I the only one who is complicated this way? Am I supposed to repress the other feelings? No, because that just strengthens them, says the research. Evidently science thinks that people's actual feelings are identical to those expressed on a greeting card. And how can it be better to give than receive when that decrease the opportunities to feel gratitude?

I'm also one of those who believe in what Wiseman calls "the myth of active listening." Science has shown that couples don't have to listen to each other. The presumption of the listening exercises is that members of a couple actually want to empathize with each other. Forcing them to do so against their will isn't really the purpose, but if you think behavioristically, science is only about what you do.

Writing is better than thinking because you organize your thoughts and give them a structure. I always suspected I'd hate a book like this but felt I should give it a chance and now I can hate it in a deeper structured way. I played several games of chess online before writing this review which is supposed to reinforce the logical thought that went into the ideas expressed herein. I just skimmed the last half which may mean I missed the most worthwhile parts but it made me happy to be done with it and isn't happiness the goal?

The research suggests that I'd probably have felt a lot better giving this book more than one star though my actual experience suggests otherwise.

Achievement Unlocked!

Jesus was "born this way" (Son of God) but the Buddha had to earn it. At least that's one way the story goes though some (mainly in the East) think any seeker can potentially upgrade their state of consciousness to "enlightened" though vanishingly few manage to actually do so. In the old days, it was not uncommon for Americans to travel to the East seeking spiritual achievement just like foreigners came to the USA looking for material achievement. The Beatles traveled to India and came back with Maharishi. Was he a finder? Several gurus soon came to America to save us the trip and teach us how to transform our consciousnesses, though many suspected these spiritual teachers really came here for material achievement.

What does the technology of the East offer us that we couldn't, with our American know how, figure out how to do even better? We've turned mindfulness into a way to reduce stress, getting rid of those pesky religious trappings. Couldn't science engineer a superior spiritual path? The goal would need a more sciency name though. How about "fundamental wellbeing"?

When Dr. Martin began his research in 2006, he wanted to study those who had succeeded at reaching a superior consciousness in hopes of doing so himself and though it doesn't become clear until the last chapter, "A Personal Note," he was successful. He designed a protocol so that others could do so too (for $2997 according to a recent marketing email).

The Tao that can be written about in a book isn't the real one and non-symbolic consciousness, which is what Dr. Martin originally called his goal, by its very nature resists being symbolized. But that never stops folks from trying. Still, we symbolizers must always keep in mind that what we end up with will be a very different animal than what we set out to trap in our cages.

Take, for example [b:Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book|4129848|Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book|Daniel M. Ingram|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348837009l/4129848.SY75.jpg|4177039]. This is a how-to book for specific goals ("The Finders" does not say much about technique)--a sort of walk-through for the video game of Buddhism. Enlightenment in this context means the ability to do the tricks Gautama could do.

"The Finders" characterizes enlightenment (now called "Fundamental Wellbeing") by its cognitive, emotional, sense-of-self, memory, and perceptive effects. One wants to achieve this because one's life becomes subjectively better. The proof of betterness is that hardly any finders report a wish to return to their previous unenlightened condition. Yet, some do! Jed McKenna in his [b:Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing|149961|Spiritual Enlightenment The Damnedest Thing|Jed McKenna|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348316611l/149961.SY75.jpg|144743] warns that enlightenment isn't what you should seek as it will ruin your life. [a:Eckhart Tolle|4493|Eckhart Tolle|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1505974741p2/4493.jpg] (is he a finder?) doesn't indicate that there are any downsides to his teachings. Are these people all talking about the same thing? If we are being "non-symbolic", does it even make sense to ask that question?

You have to wonder to what extent those who "mastered the core techniques" would qualify as finders. It's obvious, however that few who complete the finders course are skilled in those core techniques. So, destinations differ. At the same time, there are those who will tell you there is no destination, or, worse perhaps, that you are already "there" if you only realized it. Even this book distinguishes between different flavors of finder--that there are perhaps as many as 20 separate "locations" along a continuum where one could end up (though hardly anything is said about any of those other than the first four.)

How then can we characterize a finder? Dr. Martin says it is the absence of a narative self. Becoming a finder, known in this book as "transitioning" (it was written before the gender revolution), is then often experienced as the extinguishing of this self. What is a "narative self?" Early on, Dr. Martin claims that the vast majority of people have this internal construct that keeps a running commentary, often critically, on their life. (Do you have one, dear reader?) Why call that absence "non-symbolic?"

Another reviewer, rating the book one star says it was "not what I was seeking" adding that it "sounded like someone who just doesn't care!" Indeed, some of Jeffery's finders don't seem to care about all that much. Jeffery considers that a problem and specifically warns his students about how bad it will turn out if they lose all their motivation. [a:Jed McKenna|86669|Jed McKenna|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] seems to be a non-carer and makes fun of those on the path who make a big deal about compassion. "I don't do heart," he says, but he also says ""I don't eat human eyeballs or shoot Disney characters. I'm a nice guy." So he does care--it's just not part of his enlightenment. Contrast this with [a:Daniel Ingram|1438812|Daniel Ingram|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] (who wrote Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha) who makes a point of teaching Buddhist ethics as an essential part of the enlightenment process. Compassion is by no means optional for him.

I actually finished this book (the audiobook--which goodreads doesn't list among editions) almost two months ago and started my review then but it's taken until now to figure out what I wanted to say. In the sense of being "food for thought," this was an excellent book for me, but I think that's actually more of an accident so I can't really give the book credit, but let me explain what I've figured out.

The term "enlightenment" seen as the end of a journey is misleading. It is a feeling one has after certain realizations. There are many such realization experiences and the order one has these differs for each person "on the path." I never felt enlightened because I lacked a "narrative self." I could qualify as a "finder" in Dr. Martin's sense but that wasn't what I'd been seeking. I'd been seeking something I called "understanding"--I wanted life to make sense to me-- and when I had the clear realization that there could be no such actual understanding outside of the subjective feeling of it, that's when I felt enlightened. I stopped seeking because I now knew that what I was looking for didn't exist in the form I required. It was like looking for a rational number whose square is two and then understanding the proof that the square root of two is irrational. There were many other realizations I still needed, perhaps an infinite number of them.

Dr. Martin's finders aren't all enlightened. They have (at best) just had some basic realizations which they now understand intellectually. Many have incorporated their realizations into their (still mostly intact) egos. Instead of "enlightened" we'd be better calling these people "awakened" though many have likely fallen back asleep and merely remember having been awake.

Still, having 70% of your students reach an awakening experience is impressive. But perhaps that figure, based on what students have reported, isn't all that accurate. I had an intellectual understanding of a lot of these concepts before I had enough experiences to integrate any of it into who I was. It makes sense that many spiritual traditions discourage people from comparing their experiences and understandings with each other because it is the opposite of helpful.

If you do koan study as a zen practitioner, after solving a koan, you get another one to work with. You don't graduate--it's not an "achievement unlocked" situation. The sound of one hand clapping, the non-duality koan, teaches you something different than "If you say this is not a stick, I will hit you with it" which basically teaches the limits of language and conceptual understanding and how it can trap you. These are separate experiences and not things that you can get from their intellectual discussion.

Dr. Martin thinks like an academic psychologist and does his research accordingly. It's interesting research and I'm glad to have read this summary of some of it's results, but I also think it's basically wrongheaded, even just as research, and I don't trust his conclusions. For that reason, I'm giving it 2 stars because the reader should be warned it can be misleading.

You might say, if you look at the number of books Goodreads lists me as "currently reading" that I suffer from reader's block but I am not really suffering and it's just that I tend to start new books before finishing the old ones. Sometimes all I read for days at a time is the World Wide Web. Therein, at any point one can continue or follow a link and be reading something else, likely with links of its own to follow or not follow as one wishes.

Reader's Block is like this, only you have to supply your own links to follow up on what it offers. Someone should fix this!
But meanwhile, I am cutting and pasting what it offers into a search engine. Not always--sometimes I already understand the reference and other times am too lazy or simply don't care. Is this a novel or just a novelty? Maybe it is a kit from which a novel can be built. Maybe it should say on the cover "Some assembly required."

Why this lists of factoids? Is it because "Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre."? (Mallarmé said that.)
At one point he says: "I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it" But it turns out this is just a quote from the novel [b:Nightwood|53101|Nightwood|Djuna Barnes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298480120l/53101.SY75.jpg|828739]. (Thank you Google.)

It has a protagonist, named Reader. Reader is, or wants to be, a writer and the work he plans has a protagonist named Protagonist who is a reader. Reader may or may not be speaking. That is, the book may or may not be in the first person. Certainly it's often unclear who is speaking and whether he is or is not actually quoting someone else--even quoting someone else quoting. Or, as Heidegger, an anti-semite, says (or thought) "We do not come to thoughts. They come to us." What he actually said (in German) has been so translated. Or has it? Best I can find on the internet is that a book about Heidegger paraphrases his thought with that sentence (in German.) The book's author knew Heidegger but lived twenty years longer. Markson points out that biographies that end with the death of their subject don't allow the other characters in the story to "live on" in this way. Or so I am paraphrasing him.

I have now obtained the book about Heidegger. That's how it works with this "novel." I am following the links. There are many artists/writers/musicians mentioned/quoted/referenced within. And scientists and philosophers and generals and performers and so on. I counted 86 such people that Markson says are anti-semites. Wikipedia tells me that Markson was born a Jew. The Jewish Review of Books tells me that Robert Lowell, who Markson lists as anti-semitic, was not particularly so, unlike the rest of Lowell's family. In fact he was one eighth Jewish, but perhaps that's that just shows the kind of anti-semite he is. Karl Marx is listed though he is against all religions. Still I'm following the links. After all, I see no virtue in being uninformed. (That being a quote from Gandhi that appears in the book.)

The artists and scientists, etc are all suffering humans.

"Napoleon and Karl Marx had hemorrhoids.
As did Wordsworth.
As did Tennessee Williams."
"Milton suffered from constipation."
"Moses spoke with a stutter. As did Virgil.
And Somerset Maugham. And Philip Larkin."

They love each other, they have contempt for each other, they were underpaid for their work--or paid to have it published, have no sex or a whole lot, and suffer from mental illnesses. They are distant (or close) relatives of each other. They committed crimes or were the victims of it. They died in non-ordinary ways, commonly suicide or murder. It's almost like Reader is evaluating himself (as a writer, as a human) by comparing himself to these notables. Or collecting details for the life he will give his protagonist. We are presumably being invited to evaluate our own lives. In the end, they are amazing or amazingly horrible. If there's a theme, that's it. So why bother? Or, equivalently, why not bother? There's much to be gained. Hemingway got that Swedish thing (what he called the Nobel prize). Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar.

Reader decides that his Protagonist has pretty much withdrawn from life to live in an disused cemetery.

Recommended for reading during a pandemic.

The idea sounds like a good one when you first hear it--treat conspiracy theories as a phenomenon separate from their contents. When do they proliferate? Who tends to believe them? How do they align with the political spectrum? Is there an objective way to evaluate them? Etc.

There are useful things to say in this context but in the end, like many results in the social sciences, it's never quite convincing. I want to say "not as convincing as a good conspiracy theory," for like a short story, a good one is a work of art. It's not an accident that they are often made into movies: e.g. Capricorn One, JFK, The Manchurian Candidate, or The Parallax View.

And though the authors make a case for letters to the editor of the Times as suitable data, I wonder if the true conspiracy theory consumer wouldn't rather read The National Enquirer.

One of the tests for evaluating a theory is to ask who benefits from the conspiracy. The conclusion that neither the left nor the right are more prone to conspiracy theories is the kind of result that benefits the authors of this book in that it makes them sound more objective in the end. And it's not the kind of result you'll see in ads for the book because it would scare away the readership hoping to have their beliefs confirmed.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3 so I sound more objective.

2 and a half stars rounded down to 2. Hicks is, if nothing else, clear and concise. It makes him easy to read and easy to understand. He sees Nazism as primarily an ideology and argues that it is best opposed by a counter ideology. This ideology matches that of Nietzsche half the time and opposes it the other half (though the Nazis chose to ignore that part).

I disagree that the ideology of Nazism is primary or as clear and consistent as Hicks makes it out to be. In fact, one aspect of Nazi theory is that passion is more important than the intellect so Nazism is explicitly anti-ideology. Just because philosophers like Heidegger supported him didn't make it an intellectual movement.

Hicks plays up the "socialist" part of National Socialism and points out the socialist aspects of the Nazi platform. Though these aspects existed when it was founded and Hitler gave speeches praising socialism and denouncing Capitalism, this was mainly lip service intended to win over the working class. He did favor nationalizing key aspects of the economy but that was just because he wanted to control them. Hitler was anti-union and anti-equality. Most other sources are clear on this (e.g. Encyclopedia Britanica) and point out, for example, he was probably behind the murder of Gregor Strasser, a party leader and proponent of socialism 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.

On the plus side, you can read through this book in a day or two.