David Giacalone at f/k/a had a beautiful post yesterday suggesting haiku books we all might give as holiday gifts. It made me realize I have books to recommend too -- far more prosaic books, but books that interested me, and felt relevant to jury questions, in the past year.
None of these books is about the courtroom, or even about the law. There are lots of books about juries and trial work, and many are tremendous, but they're not where my focus has been lately. Instead, writing about juries has drawn me to authors who challenge my thinking about how other people react, respond, decide, and simply are. Here are some of them. (The links are to Amazon because it's quicker, but buy them from an independent bookstore like Harry W. Schwartz, Milwaukee's eighty-year-old treasure.)
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. "A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was." The question in many trials is whether harm was predictable; Taleb convincingly argues we hardly ever get the answer right.
- Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks. I had no idea that different people respond to music in so many different ways. Think how different we must all be in other respects as well.
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. It's true: we do think without thinking, and it's a different way of looking at every decision made in a trial, from how you pick jurors to how they hear what you say.
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. Inspired by the concept of "sticky" ideas in Gladwell's The Tipping Point, it's a step-by-step guide to getting ideas across.
- Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes, by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne. "Penn delves into the ever-splintering social subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean." You won't always agree with him ("young knitters" might not be a trend you think you need to know about), but it may cure you of thinking you can remotely predict how demographic swaths like "businessmen" or "African-Americans" will respond to your case.
- Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande. A thoughtful doctor's observations of his profession gave me a different perspective on my own.
As for myself, if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get a haiku book.
(Photo by Darren Hester at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ppdigital/2054205955/; license details there.)
