Two more books recommended by Daniel Pink

Story by Robert McKee

McKee's book on screenwriting is actually a very nice dissection of an effective story. The advice can be applied to novels, presentations, even playing music (brought home to me by watching Maxim Vengarov's Masterclass on DVD). There is so much good information that I bought a copy of it so that I can use it as a reference.

Dates: 17 Sept - 7 Oct 2010
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

*****

Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman

This book may be revolutionary, but it was too long. The main reason to read this book is to learn facial features of emotions (sadness/agony, anger, surprise/fear, disgust/contempt, enjoyable emotions), but Ekman spends most of the time talking about when people feel these emotions - not very interesting reading. If I get a chance, I'll list the features, if they're not on Ekman's website.

Although I generally had to force myself to read the book, there were other interesting tidbits. The features are universal, e.g. they are displayed by people with no contact with Western culture. Darwin actually proposed this years ago, but nobody believed him. Learning these features could help us improve our communication with others, as long as we remember that the features convey emotion, but not the reason behind the emotions. Finally, I found it interesting that not much research had been done on differentiating "enjoyable emotions" such as amusement or ecstasy. As Ekman said, we know more about mental disorder than mental health. But that probably has changed since the 2003 publication of the version I read.

Dates: 25 Sept - 19 Oct 2010
Rating 3 out of 5 stars