Flap Copy: One of the most influential economists of the decade-and the New York Times bestselling author of The Great Stagnation-boldly argues that just about everything you’ve heard about food is wrong.

Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they’re wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don’t have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!

Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.

Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen’s response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you’ll choose to eat today and how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.

Review: I…really struggled with this book. I read Discover Your Inner Economist by the same author when it came out, and I don’t recall struggling with that, so perhaps it was not the writing so much as the topic of An Economist Gets Lunch that I had a hard time with.

The book just seemed so scattershot. It jumps from a chapter on barbecue to a chapter on Chinese food to one on corn production to global warming to a chapter on Mexican food and then a world tour of the best places to eat in Asian and European cities. The author claims to be only an ‘everyday foodie’ and not well traveled, but his food preferences are decidedly highbrow and he’s been to Paris twenty times and somewhere else at least fifteen. It just seems…out of touch with the regular reader.

I will say that there is fascinating stuff to be found in this book. Absolutely fascinating, not least of which is why the food between sister cities El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico is so drastically different to each other, or how we all wind up on autopilot when we enter a grocery store and what combating that autopilot can do for your health, your wallet and your tastebuds, or his conviction that taxi drivers are the single most reliable source for food recommendations in any given city. The points he raised about the food production system we use, the transportation our food is subjected to, and the misconceptions about how what we eat contributes to global warming are salient and startling. With a little more obvious organization, I think this book would be truly accessible to the everyday foodie – and the everyday reader.

Source: Netgalley from Penguin

Flap Copy: A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.

They succeeded by transforming habits.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

Review: Charles Duhigg has written what might be the perfect book for readers of narrative investigative nonfiction. Filled with anecdotes ranging from personal to societal to institutional habits, The Power of Habit is a broad and deep examination of how habits can rule our lives – for good or ill.

The majority of the book focuses on the history of this developing science – this is not a prescriptive book because as the author points out, each habit is different and there is no one-size-fits-all fix for the ones we’d like to change. Instead, learning how habits work can give us the knowledge and power to conquer our mindless behaviors. An appendix offers specific reader’s guide to changing habits (it’s available on Scribd) and helps the reader put into practice everything that Duhigg has explored in the previous pages.

I enjoyed this book every bit as much as I’d hoped I would – it’s a wonderful, modern look at the topics covered in books like Blink, The Paradox of Choice and Emotional Intelligence. Highly recommended.

Source: ARC from Random House