Ryan DeJonghe - The Avid Reader

The description says this book is “stuffed with exercises” that improves practical intelligence. Between that and the cover of the book, I thought this would be an excellent read, but it didn’t turn out that way. There’s a lot of exposition, but it’s not very captivating. Reading Malcom Gladwell’s OUTLIERS has proven to be a much more interesting exposition of IQ. And as Gladwell did, so does this book: we look at the differences between IQ and practical intelligence. In other words: street smarts.

The exercises are what lured me into looking at this book, but they weren’t all that useful. Yes, some of them are challenging, but many of them are not repeatable. It’s like solving a puzzle book—and really, you’ll probably find a lot more puzzles in a dedicated book than getting this book that claims to be “stuffed” with them.

I like the idea of this book and the author did a lot of hard work putting it together, but it really isn’t up to par with what I was expecting. Sorry.

I do want to thank Crown Publishing and Three Rivers Press for sending it to me to review—there’s interesting things in here, but it doesn’t captivate, even for a willing audience.