"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

This book was published last year.  I got about 1/4 of the way through it and gave up.  The author won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, but this book is solidly within the field of Psychology, not Economics.

The author goes on and on and on and on and on and on with an exposition on the subject of two cognitive systems within the human mind, which he refers to as System 1 and System 2.  The first system is our more reactive self, given to acting on emotion and instinct.  The second system is our more intellectual self, given to the slower processes of analysis and reflection.

I think good benchmarks for a book like this are:

1) Was it enlightening?  Did it help me understand something?
2) Was it interesting?  Did it answer question(s) that were important to me?
3) Was it useful?  Did I use the knowledge gained within this book in my daily life?

And with such benchmarks in mind, this book seems flimsy and overwritten, full of examples that lead nowhere.  I failed to see how the author's System 1 and System 2 were any improvement over previous psychological models of the human consciousness.  This book was also deeply repetitive, and thus boring.  This book gave me nothing at all to use in my daily life, even though I am a teacher, and always looking for some insight into how people learn and think.

But maybe this book got really interesting towards the end.  Maybe it grew more insightful.  Maybe it offered ideas that would have revolutionized my understanding of the human mind.

I will never know, because I failed to read it all the way through.  I turned instead to other books, perhaps more frivolous in nature, but infinitely more entertaining.