Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Neuharth, Dan.  Secrets You Keep from Yourself: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Happiness.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.

Why is that we sometimes, maybe often, find ourselves doing things that are not truly in our best interest?  Why do we undermine our success?  Are we just messed up?  Sort of.

Psychotherapist Dan Neuharth, in his book Secrets You Keep from Yourself, finds the answer in fear.  Especially, it is fear of emotional loss.  As he puts it, “Bottom line, fear is why we get in our own way.”

Much of the book is directed toward helping readers identify their fears and confront them.  As Neuharth points out, there is a lot of false logic in fears.  For instance, he says that our fears make us feel that a situation will go on forever, that feelings are innate within ourselves and that they are totally pervasive.  He responds that in truth most situations change (emotions are especially fleeting), our feelings are often triggered by external events or even random and our problems don’t affect every part of life (or don’t have to).

Another way our fears trick us is through false accounting.  Our internal accountant hates emotional loss, and so will put great weight on even the slightest potential for loss.  In addition, he discounts potential gains, making them seem less worthy and valuable.  When he weighs the costs and benefits, he keeps his thumb on the scale so the costs always outweigh the benefits.  Because of this, fear can freeze us in inaction or prompt us to take action contrary to our interests; the internal accountant has no interest in taking risks.  As with other feelings of fear, identifying what we fear losing and taking a balanced look at potential losses and gains can help us take reasonable action.

I took a lot of notes while reading this book.  I normally take a few notes while reading nonfiction books to help me write reviews for this blog.  In this case, however, my notes are mostly exercises and personal insights from the book.  It prompted me to spend some time thinking about what I fear, what I want and what I can do about it.  I was surprised to see some of my unproductive behaviors identified and explained.

These exercises can help you identify specific fears and desires.  Neuharth categorizes the most common fears and wants and provides simple tests to help the reader see which ones apply.  You won’t be left hanging with vague feelings of unease; you’ll be able to put your finger on specific fears.  Armed with that knowledge and with other tools from the book, you’ll be able to confront them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Google

Glossary of Phobias

A phobia is the fear of something, typically a strong, irrational fear that prompts an overreaction. Phobias can be serious psychological problems for some people, and some phobias are medical conditions.

acrophobia - heights

agoraphobia – open spaces; used to refer to very strong fear or anxiety of situations that cause a person to feel anxious, typically, but not necessary, in public or social situations

anatidaephobia – being watched by a duck; coined by Gary Larson in a Far Side cartoon

androphobia – men

anthropophobia - people

arachibutyrophobia – peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth

athazagoraphobia – forgetting, or being forgotten or ignored

cacophobia – ugliness

coimetrophobia - cemeteries

cenosillicaphobia – an empty glass; probably coined speciously by a Latin major on his 21st birthday

coulrophobia – clowns

cryophobia – cold, extreme cold, ice or frost

ergasiophobia – work or functioning, particularly a surgeon’s fear of operating

food neophobia – unfamiliar food; avoiding of or reluctance to taste unfamiliar food

iatrophobia – medical doctors

phobophobia – fear or phobias

photophobia – bright light; sufferers can have strong sensitivity to light and may experience pain or migraines

sesquipedalophobia – long words (a silly variation, not used in formal writing, is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia)

xenophobia – foreigners

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Maurer, Robert. One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. New York: Workman Publishing, 2004.



Small is good. That is the message of kaizen and Dr. Robert Maurer. Kaizen is the concept, popular in Japanese industry, of making small, continuous improvements. It had its origins in American industry as it geared up of the imminent demands of World War II.

Maurer describes why smallness works in personal psychology. It starts with the brains reaction to fear. Any sufficiently big change triggers the fear reaction, even if the actual threat it low. This reaction prepares the mind and body to fight or flee. There is no time for philosophizing, fancy imagining or creative analysis when your in immediate danger, so we lose access to the parts of our brain that contain those functions. Instead of creative thinking and reasonable risk taking, we revert to familiar and seemingly safe behavior when faced with something new.

Kaizen gets around this by having us contemplate things that are so small they don’t trigger fear. Instead of tackling the big questions, ask yourself a small one. Instead of leaping into anxiety-producing activity, spend some time just imagining doing it. Instead of massive reform, take just the smallest steps toward your goals. Instead of biting off the big problems, nibble on the little ones.

Once you slipped passed the fear with things so small they seem ridiculous, your brain, which enjoys problem solving, will take up the task. One small thing builds on another, your fear reduces as your familiarity grows, and change can occur with surprising speed.

Maurer provides several examples both on the personal and corporate levels. Some come from the experiences of his patients.

Maurer does not deny the value of innovation, major, sweeping, quick change. It is very difficult, but it sometimes works and is sometimes necessary. However, for many of the changes people want to make, particularly in their personal lives, small changes that stick are often the way to go, especially when our own brains can sabotage a major change.

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. 2001. New York: Norton, 2002.

The stories are horrific. Sick people, men, women and children alike, are mistakenly declared dead by ignorant officials, careless medics and, worst of all, their own families, and confined to the grave while still alive. They wake in their coffins, nailed in, sometimes in time to be saved by a watchful attendant, sometimes to have their feeble cries ignored by the uncaring or hushed by the superstitious, sometimes too suffer a second, more terrifying, death. In these last cases, belated exhumations reveal bodies broken and twisted by impossible efforts to escape. Most of these stories are false.

That is the fortunate conclusion of Dr. Bondeson. His exploration of fear of premature burial spans history, society, literature and medicine over the course of centuries.

Fear of live interment peaked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time when medical professionals lost faith in the signs of death and common people lost faith in the medical profession. Such a fear now, in the west where modern medical practice is well established, would be considered irrational, but in those days, it was more reasonable, even if it was unlikely to occur.

In Germany, the view prevailed that only putrefaction was a sure sign of death, and it sparked the building of hospitals for the uncertainly dead, where attendants closely watched corpses for signs of life until sufficient decay confirmed its absence. Similar views later prevailed in France, though it did not build similar mortuaries. Anti-premature-burial was always a minority movement in English speaking nations, but adherents held out the longest in the United States and United Kingdom through ties to spiritualism, fringe medicine and other groups.


Bondeson shows the folly of the sensationalists who stirred live burial fears, but shows some sympathy for the true philanthropists who took up the cause. He doesn’t even rule it out today in undeveloped areas where modern methods for diagnosing death don’t prevail.

Buried Alive contains more than a few page-long paragraphs, but it is very readable. The tone is not academic and Bondeson’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. He handles some of the more lurid and sensational aspects of the history and literature with tongue-in-cheek humor.

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

You may have heard of Lucinda Bassett and the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. I remember hearing her on radio commercials talking about a book or audio program. You may have seen her infomercial or an appearance on a talk show, notably Oprah.

As you can guess form the name of her business, Bassett focuses on helping people overcome stress, anxiety, and fear. That is the purpose of her book, The Solution.

The first part of The Solution is a description of the problem. Of course, a certain amount of fear, stress, and anxiety are natural. They are our built-in emotional and physical responses to threats in our environment. They become problems when we experience them too often, when they capture us in constrained and unsatisfying lives. The worst part is that much of the fear, anxiety, and stress we experience is our own doing, responses to worries and imagined threats.

Worry turns our imagination into our worst enemy.  We seek out threats, conjure catastrophes, and foresee the worst. Bassett says we can turn this around. We can train ourselves to use our imaginations positively, to seek opportunities, to foresee desirable results. This notion is fundamental to most self-help, but Bassett frames it a little more interestingly. We can worry positively. A great worrier can be a great success.

These worries and the habitual behaviors they trigger, are rooted in a core story. This is another opportunity for reframing. A core story that once lead to defeat and discouragement can become motivation to strive for something better. Exercises in the book guide the reader in discovering his core story.

The second half of the book presents six strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety.

•  Detachment is about accepting and letting go of things you cannot change, being honest, and holding on to peace.
• Security is about improving your attitudes and beliefs about money and getting your financial house in order.
• Good health is important to coping with stress. Diet, exercise and sleep are the keys to good health.
• Compassion is a potent antidote to anxiety. Show yourself compassions by stopping the negative messages you repeat to yourself and intentionally practice positive self-talk.
• Reconnects with you dreams and decide what you want, the develop a plan to achieve your goals. Put the plan into action.
• A balanced life looks different for different people, but balance helps us all feel less anxious. Set your priorities, act on them, and live with purpose in the moment.

 
The strength of the book is Bassett’s own experience. She is someone who was once hindered by anxiety who has turned her imagination from and enemy to an ally. She reframed her core story from one of loneliness and lack to motivation to have a good life of family and abundance. Bassett also enlivens the book with stories of her clients, popular figures, and historical people.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain, Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Bassett, Lucinda. The Solution: Conquer Your Fear, Control Your Future. New York: Sterling, 2011.

You Can Become the Person You Want to Be by Robert H. Schuller

As a megachurch pastor of a previous generation, Robert H. Schuller wrote several books about what he called possibility thinking. In You Can Become the Person You Want to Be, Schuller puts for the idea their own beliefs, or “impossibility thinking,” holds that people back. People allow fear and perfectionism to hold them back. The delay to form perfect plans, they quit when they discover the slightest flaw, the turn back when things get tough. As a result, many people are missing out on the life they want.

In contrast, Schuller encourages what he calls possibility thinking. Recognize that there is no perfect plan. Look for the good and start building on it to improve your life.

He offers advice for building possibility thinking. For instance, get to the root of fear. Very often you will find that things you fear are things you can handle, or possibly the aren’t very bad at all. Instead of being insurmountable roadblock, you fears are often things you can handle (or learn to overcome, or get help with) if they even happen.

If you have a good idea, start now. Do not delay. Start small and build in stages.  If you believe you can solve the problems that you must overcome to do a worthy thing, you will. Schuller offers several problem-solving tips.

Throughout the book, Schuller encourages the use of affirmations. He even lists several. Affirmations activate your faith and build your possibility thinking.

Schuller’s book is flavored with religion, as you would expect of a pastor. He doesn’t suggest that God is a major factor in things until the later chapters of the book. Even so, the religious tone of the book are not really any stronger, and only a little more specific, than what you might find in a host of other self-help books.

Robert H. Schuller also wrote

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good

Self-Love

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

I Declare by Joel Osteen

Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Schuller, Robert H. You Can Become the Person You Want to Be. New York: Hawthorn, 1973.

Without...fear of God...all the arts, and science, and knowledge in the world do not constitute true wisdom

“The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom;” and without this fear of God, or true religion, all the arts, and science, and knowledge in the world do not constitute true wisdom.

-Noah Webster

God has not given us a spirit of fear

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind.

-2 Timothy 1:7

It's Not About Me by Max Lucado

Many of our problems arrive from our focus on us. The cure, which leads to fulfillment, is a life focused on Christ. Max Lucado makes the case for this idea in his book It’s Not About Me.

Everything and everyone was made to reveal the glory of God. God is holy. It is hard to imagine how higher and more is God than anything else is, and He made everything else. Contact with God changes us and we become holy, different and set apart, too. When Moses was given a glimpse of God, his face shown so that people were afraid to look at him.

We are to shine, too, as mirrors that reflect the glory of God. We have reason to praise Him. He is our stable foundation; He never changes though all else does. He saved us entirely for His own purposes and pleasure even though we could never deserve it. He redeems our suffering, and our fleeting suffering for His name’s sake will be rewarded with eternal blessing. If we have success in life, it is His gift. Even our bodies are His and make to glorify Him, so it important for us to take care of our bodies and avoid sin.

I found a personal connection to one of the stories recounted by Lucado. As a Texan, he was aware of the collapse of the Queen Isabella Causeway on September 15, 2001,when it was struck by a barge. I was vacationing nearby in Corpus Christi at the time. One of my in-laws reacted in fear, assuming my wife and I must have been trapped, or worse killed (even though the bridge collapsed in the middle of the night), and frantically called anyone in the family or at work who might have some contact with us. A close relative of mine shrugged it off, saying a call from the Texas Highway Patrol would come if something happened to us. One reacted with fear (surely, something was wrong), one reacted with faith (we were in God’s hands, whatever happened).

You might note that this happened only days after terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in New York. On the first day of that vacation, we were struck by another car under strange circumstances in Arkansas, leaving us stuck in Morrilton; we ended up skipping a planned stop at Hot Springs. The collapsing bridge was the last straw, we were too heartsick to enjoy our vacation and we came home early.

Even after all that, we were grateful. We were alive and well when so many others were not. We had our family with us when others did not. We knew God was with us, comforting us, and that even if the worst had happened to us, we would be with Him, which is the thing our hearts long for.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Stop Whining, Start Living by Dr. Laura

Walking with God by John Eldredge

I previously posted a review of this book here->.

Lucado, Max. It’s Not About Me. Nashville, TN: Integrity, 2004.

Revelation

Revelation is a difficult book to understand. It has much symbolic and apocalyptic language, and I am far removed from the time and culture in which it was written. I’m not going to clear it up in a few hundred words.

Even so, I’d like to offer a perspective on the book. It seems to me that Revelation is a source of a lot of fear and confusion. So much of the Bible is intended to encourage and edify believers that it is clear to me that fear and confusion are not the intent of the Apostle John or God in the writing of Revelation. As a believer wrestling with this part of God’s Word, however you may feel, do not be afraid.

I’ve seen and heard television and radio program focused on Bible prophecy, particularly Revelation. Some seem particularly alarming or sensational, and others seem to shoehorn current events into a particular interpretation of Revelation and Bible eschatology. Rarely have these programs increased my understanding. Eschatology is important; God addressed the end times, and we should do our best to understand what He said. However, we are not all called to be experts on eschatology, though we are all called to be imitators of Christ.

Some parts of Revelation are easy to understand. In the second and third chapters, Jesus Christ delivers through John messages to seven churches in Asia. Though written to those churches, it is still for us.  Christ’s encouragement and criticisms serve as a mirror into which Christians and churches can still can look to see themselves and how they are.

There are a few other things in Revelation that are plain, especially in light of straightforward teaching found elsewhere in the Bible. Jesus Christ will return. He will judge all the people from all of time; as believers we are already assured of God’s mercy and can expect a much different type of judgment that the one facing those who refused God and continued in their sins. We will all be bodily resurrected; God’s people will be resurrected in transformed, incorruptible bodies to live in God’s presence in a purified and remade creation forever.

Even though it is difficult, I encourage you to read Revelation. It is okay if you can’t understand it all. Ask God to help you understand. Read other books of the Bible; you may be surprised by how they can illuminate Revelation.

John also wrote

The Gospel of John

First John

Second John

Third John

Revelation. The Holy Bible. New King James Version.  Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

More from Keenan Patterson at Google+

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman & Elizabeth M. Karle

We can face all kinds of situations that cause anxiety. For some of us, that anxiety can be overwhelming and get in the way of living the life we want. Feelings of anxiety are produced in the brain as a response to triggering circumstances, and we can retrain our brains to lessen our anxious responses. Psychologist Catherine M. Pittman and her co-author Elizabeth M. Karle explain this in Rewire Your Anxious Brain.

The authors devote quite a bit of the book to describing the workings of those parts of the brain most involved in our sense of fear and anxiety. These are the amygdala and the cortex.

The amygdala has a lot of control over our fight, flight or freeze response. It is centrally located and well connected in the brain, so it can produce a powerful response before our thinking mind—the cortex—can figure out what is going on. In addition, the amygdala has its own emotional memories, independent of the cortex, so you may have an anxious response to a stimulus you have little conscious awareness of.

A big part of dealing with anxiety is retraining the amygdala. This can be difficult because it involves exposure to situations that produce anxiety. When you face those situations and see that there is no negative impact, or that they were less than you expected and you can handle it (you didn’t die), your amygdala learns that these situation aren’t so threatening and it will stop producing anxious responses. The authors show how you can take this in steps, starting will less anxiety-inducing stimulus and working your way up, but it may be faster to dive into the deep end.

Retraining the amygdala can be aided by relaxation. The book describes several relaxation practices.

Though the amygdala is always involved in producing anxiety, the cortex can be the source of it or can perpetuate it. Retraining the cortex is mainly a matter of changing your thinking. When you recognize anxiety-producing thoughts, you can change what you are thinking. You might use countering thoughts that you prepared for the situation or you might distract yourself by thinking of something altogether different. Mindfulness is a helpful practice in that it helps you to recognize that your thoughts are not necessarily the reality and you can remain peaceful while the thoughts come and go.

The book is a mix of science and how-to aimed and helping anxious people find relief. The authors strongly suggest that you get help, and I think this is a reasonable suggestion. If anxiety is interfering with your life, you will probably benefit from the aid of a professional. This book can help you understand what is happening and what can be done about it, but you may need some help to actually adapt them your own needs and put them into practice.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Pittman, Catherine M., & Elizabeth M. Karle. Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic & Worry. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2015.

Fear is why we get in our own way

Bottom line, fear is why we get in our own way.

-Dan Neuharth, Ph.D., Secrets You Keep from Yourself

New & Interesting Stuff April 13, 2014

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Best of What I Read in 2013

Even a small reallocation of time...to the pursuit of outstanding thinking could have momentous repercussions

Fear is why we get in our own way

Featured Book Summer 2014

Featured Category Summer 2014

Fic by Anne Jamison

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

Giant Sucking Sound

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior

Having spent decades...abolishing oughts because they constrain us, we...no longer have oughts to defend us

I am convinced that words or names often have more influence on the mass of men than things

I ask that God’s will be done, and I mostly sort of mean it

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Learning & sciences have no material effect in subduing ambition and selfishness

New & Interesting Stuff Jan. 26, 2014

Small Move, Big Change by Caroline L. Arnold

The core of fear is that what hurts...you may never end

The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology

Surgeon Maxwell Maltz proposed that we are powerfully motivated to—actually must—produce in reality our self-image. If one wants to improve his life, he must improve his self-image. Maltz elaborates this theory, along with advice on improving self-image, in The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology.

In an early chapter, Maltz introduces a though experiment. He encourages you to imagine yourself in a theater. You’ll find that you are also the primary actor in the show. In addition you are the writer and director. This is your self-image and you are in control—if you want to be.

Maltz returns to this concept of watching a film or play throughout the book. You can recall previous successes and bring that sense of confidence and accomplishment into the present moment to help you act with boldness. You can imagine yourself taking on challenges and overcoming them before it happens. You can use your imagination to anticipate problems. People often do this to stir up their fear and talk themselves into withdrawing, but you can also do it to invent solutions and find answers to objections so that you can proceed with reasonable confidence.

After introducing the idea of self-image, Maltz uses the remaining chapters to discuss building a healthy self-image to help you be happier and more successful in various situations or aspects of life. This covers a lot of ground, which is not easily summarized. Some of the advice seemed useful and interesting to me.

For instance, he discusses goals. Goals should be your own (not someone else’s). They should be realistic. Visualize your success (in that theater in your mind).

It’s important to be yourself. Don’t be afraid of being different. Don’t be afraid of seemingly perfect people. Accept yourself as a human being with strength and weaknesses; don’t beat yourself up. Express yourself in positive ways.

It’s natural to experience fear. Be open about it; fears seem less bad when they are brought out into the light. Solve problems as well as you can—imperfect solutions can still make things better. Once you’ve done what you can, think about something else.

Throughout the book, Maltz reiterates the basic theme. Your unconscious mind is working to produce what you want. Give it good and clear instructions by having a good, positive, realistic self-image. Your imagination, Maltz refers to it as your “success mechanism,” will guide you.

Maxwell Maltz also wrote Creative Living for Today.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Maltz, Maxwell. The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology. 1964. New York: Pocket Books, 1970.

You did not receive you a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear

You did not receive you a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.  And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

-Romans 8:15

If you want to conquer fear...go out and get busy

If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.  Go out and get busy.

-Dale Carnegie

The core of fear is that what hurts...you may never end

The core of fear is that what hurts or frightens you may never end.

-Dan Neuharth, Ph.D., Secrets You Keep from Yourself

STEM Books

I’ve reviewed 39 STEM-related books (and counting).  STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  As you may have seen in the news, there is a push to improve STEM education, interest students in STEM fields, and grow the number of workers in these fields.  The idea is that these will be the skills needed by workers of the future.  If you’re a STEM educator or a student considering a career in STEM fields, you might like to take a look at some of these books.

I’ll confess that I’m not an educator, but I think most of these books will be accessible to high school and college students, and a few to middle school students.  The list is also a reflection of my career and interests in engineering, public health, policy, and history.  Even with these biases, I think it is a good list for someone looking for STEM-related books.

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

I was fascinated by robots as a kid.  I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories.  I longed for the Omnibot 2000 in the Sears Wishbook.

Robots have come a long way.  In How to Build an Android, David F. Dufty describes the short strange life of a very complex robot made to look and talk like science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  The robot had a very sophisticated and lifelike head and complex artificial intelligence.  As with most complex things, it was the work of many people who had to solve a lot of problems.

If you’re interested in robotics, this is an interesting nontechnical book.  In addition, you’ll get introduced to some freaky sci-fi.  You may even get as (somewhat) legitimate reason to use the word “Dickhead” (capitalized, it refers to a fan of PKD, so don’t go using it on anyone).

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Interstate highway system in the United States is one of the most enormous structures built.  Some of the prospective STEM students who read this may actually be younger than the Intestate system, though in some sense it is never complete because it needs constant repair and maintenance.  The Interstates were completed in the 1990s, but the Federal-Aid Highways go back to 1916.

Earl Swift wrote an accessible history of the Interstates in The Big Roads.  If you interested in automobiles or transportation, it’s a good read.

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Deborah Cadbury describes seven wonders of engineering in Dreams of Iron and Steel.  It covers almost a century of history, but many of the events are concentrated in the Victorian Era.  That was a time of great technological innovation.

Though the book is history, many of the structures still stand.  Railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Suez and Panama Canals, and Hoover Dam stand testament to an age of big engineering.

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Though the memory of Professor Wragg’s sneer prompts me to not make this confession, part of my interest in science and technology came from comic books.  Iron Man was cool.  Spider-Man’s web shooters were very cool.  Superhero comics are full of fantasy, admittedly, but the strange, unrealistic science and technology they depict have inspired many to study STEM in reality.

Physicist John Kakalios uses examples from comic books to explore real physics in The Physics of Supeheroes.  Sometimes comics get there science right.  Even when they get it wrong, it can be instructive.  If you know what people are talking about when they refer to the “New 52,” you may find this book to be a great introduction to physics.

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

Here is another confession: I’m not especially interested in math.  I endured a lot of math classes to study engineering.  Reading David Acheson’s 1089 and All That did not require such endurance.  For one reason, it is a short book.  For another, Acheson doesn’t expect his readers to be mathematicians; it is enough to follow the outline of the math he discusses.

I recommend this book because so many people have a fear of math.  1089 can be followed by many high school students and older folks with math phobias.  Just take a deep breath, relax, and follow along as well as you can.  You’ll see that math can be interesting, useful, and even beautiful in a way.

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Judith St. George’s The Brooklyn Bridge is a short history of and iconic bridge.  Written for the bridge’s 100^th anniversary, it is also the story of the engineers who sacrificed life and health to see it completed: John Roebling and his son Washington.  John Roebling was a German immigrant who built many suspension bridges and owed a wire-making business.  He gave his son and extraordinary education in bridge engineering for the time, and before beginning work on the Brooklyn Bridge he served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Why should a cutting-edge STEM student read about a bridge that is almost 130 years old?  It’s because we still use and rely on very successful, centuries old technologies.  Improving and rebuilding our infrastructure will be an important part of our economy.  As recently as 2010, New York City and the federal government committed $500 million to repair and repaint the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

STEM lumps together science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Is there a difference between science and engineering?  Is it important?

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history and author of The Essential Engineer, believes there is an important difference.  At heart, science is about increasing knowledge.  Engineering is about invention.  Of course, new knowledge makes new invention possible.  Just as often, though, engineering runs ahead of science.  Sometimes science didn’t advance until someone invented the instruments to conduct new observations and experiments.  The invention of the microscope made possible the science of microbiology.  Steam engines were built and greatly improved before we had a modern scientific understanding of thermodynamics.  In fact, thermodynamics was to a large extent born out of desire to understand steam engines. In this sense, it is an engineering science (study of manmade things) as much as a natural science (study of natural things) or branch of physics.

Petroski’s focus in the book is the importance of engineering to policymaking, where it is often overshadowed by science.  Policy, science, and engineering play off of each other a lot.  Most of my career as an engineer has been related to government, policy, and regulatory compliance.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map by science writer Steven Johnson is the story of the birth of epidemiology.  Epidemiology is a medical science that uses statistics to help us understand how diseases operate in a population.  Using various statistical and geographic tools, long before we had computers and GIS, physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera, once a recurring plague that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in some outbreaks, was a waterborne disease.  This understanding, initially met with much skepticism, allowed officials to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.  For those who say of their math classes, “I’ll never us this,” here is a case where math (and science and policy) were used to make a great difference.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

It is not much publicized today that the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 had a partly scientific mission.  Captains Lewis and Clark were charges with bringing back samples of the flora, fauna, and culture of the western territories.  It was also hoped that they would find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.  In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose writes about the scientific mission as well as the policy, diplomacy, and commercial hopes the expedition carried.

Of course, what attracts most people to the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it was a great adventure.  There is a place in STEM fields for thoughtful adventurers and explorers. 

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

A list like this deserves something strange, creepy, and more fun than you care to admit.  Right now, thousands of very young future STEM workers are catching bugs and snakes, breaking their toys to see what is inside, or staring into space with a weird expression of vacancy and concentration.

Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive is not a morbid book.  It is sometimes humorous, especially in consideration of topic.  From a STEM point of view, Bondeson shows how knowledge accumulates over time.  The fears and activities of our forefathers may seem strange to us, but they sometimes made sense in light of what they knew.  Buried Alive doesn’t simply play off our fascination with the grotesque and death, though the book might not have been written if we lacked that fascination, I think it reminds us to approach our ancestors with a touch of grace and humility.  Maybe our progeny will show us the same courtesy.

If you’re looking for something for a younger student, check out this post→ from Joanne Loves Science or these recommendations→ from STEM Friday.  By the way, I also write about engineering, infrastructure and the environment at Infrastructure Watch.

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