"Michael Lewis is a fine writer. He has a talent for making complex ideas understandable and for finding the human side of inhuman stories. He's absolutely correct that our government includes many committed civil servants who have important jobs that they do well in careers dedicated to public service. They are not all gray bureaucrats in bullshit jobs drowning us in red tape. Not everyone with an advanced degree from a good school goes into finance or tech. And in this book Mr. Lewis has gathered together other fine writers who also have compelling stories to tell about civil servants who are heroes.

But I have a huge problem with this book. It screams from cover to cover "I am a piece of publishing product." This thing was slapped together and cranked out just in time for the depredations of DOGE. Mr. Lewis and his co-authors all deserve to make a buck, but he's capable of so much more. Color me disappointed."

"I was led to this book after watching Helen Fisher’s 2006 TED talk entitled “Why we love, why we cheat.� Both the talk and the book are largely based on Fisher’s study, begun in 1996, of students at SUNY Stony Brook campus, in which the brain activities of two groups of volunteers were scanned in an MRI. One group reported to be deeply in love, while the other had recently experienced painful breakups. As one would expect, the book contains more details about the study, not provided in the TED talk, as well as additional facts and ideas.

Unfortunately little of the additional material qualifies as ground-breaking or transformative. Even the additional details about the central study do little to strengthen the author’s arguments. There is plenty of information about the experiment’s setup, but much of it assumes a rather banal character and, while perhaps mildly entertaining, is not revelatory. More troubling, the 144 brain scans mentioned by the author in her TED talk turn out to be derived from merely 14 individuals � 11 women and 3 men, all college students. Although I cannot authoritatively claim that this sample size is too small or too homogenous � much time has elapsed since my college statistics course � yet I cannot avoid a feeling of suspicion that too much is being made of too small a study.

What’s more, the numbers derived from the study are at times less convincing than the author would have us believe, hinting at a confirmation bias. For example, only 56% of the surveyed women agreed with the statement “My emotional state depends on how _____ feels about me�, yet this is given as further evidence of the author’s hypothesis. This is not a solitary example � on multiple occasions percentages in the low sixties, fifties, and even forties are unreservedly advanced to prove the author’s points, which aim at a generalized understanding. Overall the book seems to lack coherence and reads more like a loose collection of research abstracts, ideas, factoids, and quotes � lots of quotes, which are largely lyrical musings about the nature of love.

Throughout the book, the author also shows a strong proclivity for speculation, seemingly mistaking it for theory. A theory by definition must be falsifiable, yet the author commonly uses the word to refer to what is plainly untestable conjecture, which I think is impermissible in a scientist. Unsurprisingly, the chapter most heavenly laden with such “theorizing� is the one on the evolutionary origins of love. Such speculation may be intelligent, intriguing, and entertaining, but it is not strictly scientific.

Perhaps, my biggest gripe with the book though is the conclusion the author draws from her research. A good percentage of “Why We Love� is devoted to convincing us that romantic live is inherently a neurochemical addiction, not at all dissimilar from alcohol, tobacco or methamphetamine addictions either behaviorally or in its effect on the brain’s neurological pathways. In fact, this is the strongest part of the book, and the reason for my three-star rating. The presented evidence is indeed strongly in favor of the hypothesis. So, after spending so much ink proving to us that romantic love displays all the classic characteristics of a chemical addiction, what does the author propose that we do with this information? She proceeds to give us tips on how to manipulate individuals into developing romantic attachments and make romantic love last longer! Pause to consider the incongruity. This is a rational response only if one believes that the rewards of an addiction are worth the costs, and maybe the author performed the mental comparison, but if she did, she never shares these deliberations with us. As a result, the last part of the book seems oddly disconnected from the first, with the gap bridged by undisclosed value assumptions.

To recap, the book contains enough interesting ideas and data to stimulate thinking but fails to weave them into a coherent theoretical framework or a transformative narrative. Aside from monetary motivations, I am hard pressed to find reasons why this should not have been a TEDBook or a Kindle Single."

"What a huge letdown! Totally overrated. This subject truly fascinates me, but the author merely builds on the research of others and pads it with quotes from popular literature, poetry and song lyrics, as though that proves a point. If you take out all those quotes it's probably half as thick. It's like she just googled "Love" and included every quote she could find. Reads like a so-so undergrad paper. The only thing the author herself actually brings to the table is the notion that certain neurotransmitters may play a role the body's chemistry during times of heightened emotion, and that's still based on the research of others and is in no way a new theory. Also unsettling is her complete failure to acknowledge the late Dorothy Tennov who practically invented the investigative study of romantic love. She clearly references Tennov's work yet does not go so far as to name her. But this Helen Fisher is the talking head we get whenever the media wants an expert on the subject. Read Stendhal's "Love" and Tennov's "Love and Limerence"... Helen Fisher is a snake."