Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Gave up after about 40 pages. Maybe there's some real gold in the hills; just a pity he decided to drown it in a morass of incomprehensible turgidity. It needs someone like Richard Feynman to translate it from gobbledegook into English in which case the whole book might be boiled down to a few pages. Here's a sample of the kind of nonsense you will have to deal with, sentence after sentence: "In math terms, we've seen that this flow of optimal self-organization has five features, which spell out the word FACES: Flexibility, Adaptability, Coherence (functioning well over time, or resilience), Energy (a sense of vitality) and Stability." Now just in case you're wondering, there's been no math so we haven't "seen" anything in "math terms" prior to this sentence. Furthermore, the use of a acronym that spells a word that servers no actual purpose in subsequent text but now requires additional explanation of the terms is just being "clever" for its own sake. Why not just say "resilience", instead of "coherence" and then having to explain he actually means "resilience"? Because then he wouldn't have his "clever" acronym FACES... Here's more: "Studies of well-being have found that the best predictor of health and happiness is having an integrated brain, what the researcher's call an "interconnected connectome"". Really? Citation? Guess which researcher has "found" this? You got it, Dan Siegel. How he found it, who knows; maybe it came to him in the shower. What research has shown is that there is an association between poor connectivity in the connectome and Alzheimer's disease, but that hardly the same thing as what he is claiming in that sentence. The book contains no references or bibliography, and just refers the reader to a link where this material is supposed to be, but following that link returns a 404 not found error. Which more or less describes the value I got from this book. Frankly, I suspect Siegel is thriving in this "post-fact" world we're now in, where you now have license to just make stuff up. I could go on but now I'm starting to get annoyed.