Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads

by Joel Best

Book Overview

While fads such as hula hoops or streaking are usually dismissed as silly enthusiasms, trends in institutions such as education, business, medicine, science, and criminal justice are often taken seriously, even though their popularity and usefulness is sometimes short-lived. Institutional fads such as open classrooms, quality circles, and multiple personality disorder are constantly making the rounds, promising astonishing new developments--novel...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520246268
• ISBN13: 9780520246263
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

lazyreaders.com book club selection for April 2006

So what if this book just came out, and I tend to always read books that are sent to me from publishers for free? While Joel Best can often bore with statistics (he wrote the wonderful "Damned Lies and Statistics"), his point of this book is intriguing: Americans often fall for scams. He is not talking about the guys that buy Ab Rollers sold on late night infomercials (which I own, pitifully). Best is talking about how smart people in business, medicine and education cling to the next 7-step approach or easy-to-use carb diet. Education, in my opinion, suffers from this disease more than any other profession, as the pendulum has swung most recently to drilling letter sounds and endlessly assessing students as a part of the government's "No Child Left Untested" program. If nothing else, this book will get you thinking. You can read an anecdote from my own teaching experiences on the April 2006 blog of my website, www.lazyreaders.com, which archives awesome adult, young adult and children's books that are under 250 pages.