A couple of arrivals on my desk for review worth a look.
John Rentoul has been running the Questions To Which The Answer Is No! Awards for several years now. Celebrating the journalistic skill of basing an entire article on a fantastically far-fetched question-based headline and only admitting that the premise is extraordinarily unlikely in the final paragraph, his blog attracts large numbers of followers keen to submit their own favourites. This is a compilation featuring such journalistic gems as: Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? Can your dreams predict the future? Has Marilyn Monroe been reincarnated as a shop assistant called Chris?
Questions to Which the Answer is No!: Amazon.co.uk: John Rentoul: Books.
Actually, the second book is scheduled for a January release according to amazon – Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Amazon.co.uk: Maria Konnikova: It attempts to answer the question what is it that separates Sherlock Holmes from his long-suffering friend and side-kick Dr John Watson? What makes Holmes such a superior detective, able to piece together clues and solve problems that seem elementary to Watson only in hindsight? And can we – most of us, Watsons ourselves, ever hope to harness a bit of Holmes’ extraordinary powers of mind, not to solve crimes, but simply to improve our lives at work and home? Well the answer to that questions may well be yes and psychologist Maria Konnikova shows us how.