The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli, Harper, 384 pages, $25.99, Hardcover, May 2013, ISBN 9780062219688

Have you ever toiled over a project so much that even when it showed no signs of succeeding, you couldn’t let go? If so, you were a victim of effort justification. Have you ever asked a group of current customers what they thought of your product, then felt good that most liked it while only a few had complaints? If so, you might have insured those positive results with unconscious self-selection bias. Author Rolf Dobelli blames both instances of muddled thinking on our irrationality. His international bestselling The Art of Thinking Clearly presents behavioral economics, psychology, neuroscience research, and concise and relatable anecdotes to explain where we go wrong in our thought processes and how to think our way out of trouble.

According to Dobelli, we generally complicate our lives with doing, believing, and thinking in ways that seem to offer some kind of solution to our current wants and needs, but, over time, become a quicksand of contradictions. When we brush these contradictions to the side, we become increasingly irrational. He explains:

When we encounter contrasts, we react like birds to a gunshot. We jump up and get moving. Our weak spot: We don’t notice small, gradual changes. A magician can make your watch vanish because, when he presses on one part of your body, you don’t notice the lighter touch on your wrist as he relieves you of your Rolex. Similarly, we fail to notice how our money disappears. It constantly loses its value, but we do not notice because inflation happens over time. If it were imposed on us in the form of a brutal tax (and basically that’s what it is), we would be outraged.

No one wants to lose money, but we do. No one would do something “so stupid,” but we do. No one would think they jump to conclusions, but we do. The solution is working toward a clearer understanding of how our brains work, and the truth within a given situation. Dobelli’s book is a fascinating guide.

The short chapters (2-3 pages) are like brain puzzles that can actually change you. The stories will shock you as you recognize the foolish decisions you’ve made, but the stories will also inspire you to chuckle about the human condition. The big takeaway is that we all get too hung up about doing the right thing, making smart decisions, and becoming successful; reading The Art of Thinking Clearly will help you realize that a big part of every challenge is how complicated we ourselves make things. Dobelli guides us to simplify:

Forget trying to amass all the data. Do your best to get by with the bare facts. It will help you make better decisions. Superfluous knowledge is worthless, whether you know it or not. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin put it right: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.” And next time you are confronted by a rival, consider killing him—not with kindness but with reams of data and analysis.

Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas by John Butman, Harvard Business Review Press, 272 pages, $27.00, Hardcover, May 2013, ISBN 9781422172803

The first thing John Butman, an idea developer, does in his new book Breaking Out is introduce us to the concept of the “idea entrepreneur.” These innovators are not so different from the Edisons of the world; they just happen to tinker with ideas instead of inventions, and have a deep conviction that those ideas deserve and must gain attention. The first step in doing so is to create fascination. “To break out … the idea entrepreneur must find the fascination, connect it with a fundamental human issue, find ways to express it, and be willing to reveal it,” insists Butman. The value of an intriguing personal narrative cannot be over-estimated.

The best way to ensure long-lasting influence is to spread your message—“An idea is not really an idea until it is expressed,” asserts Butman—through multiple mediums. The drive to bring an idea public is three-fold, Butman says: a healthy ego, the fantasy of instant and wide-reaching instant success, and a desire to do good and help others. But, only one of those drivers is a sustainable influence:

The idea entrepreneurs who remain on the stage the longest usually keep their ego in check, get over the fantasy (or never fall pretty to it), and come to the realization that the desire to do good for others will bring them the greatest influence in the long run.

Butman’s examples of these entrenched folks include Zig Ziglar and Cesar Millan.

My favorite section of the book is titled “Respiration.” It dispels that myth that the idea that spreads does so because of the popularity of the static idea. Instead, a valuable idea doesn’t stop evolving after the creator gives it life, but grows as it goes.

By respiration, I mean that the idea starts to breathe and take on a life of its own. A simple way to think about respiration: it’s when other people start creating their own expressions about your expressions. They talk about the idea. They write about it. They incorporate it or make reference to it in their own books, speeches, blogs, articles, and videos.

Respiration is the sum total of expressions about the idea.

Reaching a wide audience and establishing a solid platform to support future iterations is the idea entrepreneur’s responsibility, and Butman sees it as a worthy goal.

Today, the impulse to start movements, make a difference, and create change in the world may have become a far stronger and relevant interpretation of the American dream than the one that has held sway for so long.

Thus, he spends the last third of the book discussing what he calls “The Thinking Journey,” which reflects on the value of passing and planting ideas.

Breaking Out is populated by a surprising crowd of creatives—from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Eckhart Tolle, Ben Franklin to Blake Mycoskie (TOMS shoes), Mohandas Gandhi to Barack Obama–that reflects Butman’s belief that idea entrepreneurs “seek to influence the thinking of others, not repress it or dismiss it. They want change, not power.” There is no doubt that you will learn from Butman, and these inimitable “idea entrepreneurs,” no matter what your message and medium.

The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele, St. Martin’s Press, 310 pages, $25.99, Hardcover, April 2013, ISBN 9781250021854

Nicco Mele opens his debut book with the following instruction: “Look around you.” It’s an especially poignant opener because the central topic of the following chapters—the internet—is perhaps the culprit behind our collective inability to do so.

The End of Big is broad in scope, as Mele delves into the internet’s role in dismantling big, traditional institutions. He begins with the big news entities, discussing the rise of distributed power via channels like Twitter and Facebook, and the simultaneous demise of large-scale traditional journalism. Mele depicts a two-fold effort against big news. The first part is the agility of the internet. Here he uses how the killing of Osama Bin Laden was broken to the public in contrast with events like the September 11th attacks, Watergate, and the assassination of JFK. The second part is money. The proliferation of media channels—the continued elongation of “the long tail” in the realm of news—has brought big news’ accounts receivable to its knees. Their readers are leaving, and advertisers know it so they’re leaving too.

The End of Big continues to give case after case of how the internet has opened the door for small enterprises to undermine once-invincible institutions. American democracy, centralized government, big entertainment, war, education, and corporations all come under Mele’s critical view. While his scope is praiseworthy, Mele’s ambivalence toward each “End of Big” is what makes the book so engrossing. For example, Barack Obama’s ability to quickly mobilize support online is a demonstration of the power of the internet, a method that did not exist 20 years prior, but it’s equally a demonstration of how any voice could gain such power.

Mele’s pros-versus-cons narrative of the internet’s role in fashioning the future of different major industries is a welcome tonic to the usual “it’s all champagne and roses” or “hell-in-a-hand-basket” perspectives. He describes himself as a tech nerd, and clearly the internet is a subject likely to appeal to a certain group, but Nicco Mele’s message is for everyone. Industries are changing, and looming large are important decisions regarding how we—individually and collectively—will greet, assist, or challenge these changes.

The book’s final chapter, titled “Big Opportunities?” offers up many possibilities. Mele discusses six ways we can turn the potential negative effects of the diffusion of power and influence into positive ones. The message is clear: the internet has empowered all of us, but we are only truly empowered if we accept the responsibilities thrust upon us. Rather than simply allow the future to happen, we must also shape it. Everything we do in life and in business will contribute to the ongoing construction of our hyper-connected future.

Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant, Viking Books, 320 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, April 2013, ISBN 9780670026555

“I want to explore what separates the champs from the chumps,” says Adam Grant in the first chapter of Give and Take. Grant sets this up with an explanation of three different personality types on a spectrum of reciprocity: takers, matchers, and givers. Givers and takers are exactly what they sound like, and matchers are the ones in the middle who do a little of both. While we all know and probably dislike takers, and most of us really operate as matchers, Grant argues that there are great benefits to being a giver.

Leading this case-rich study on interaction is Grant’s demonstration of the phenomenon in which givers are both the best and the worst performers when it comes to measuring overall success. He begins with the case of David Hornik, a venture capitalist who takes a “giver” approach to pursuing his friend’s newest startup idea. Hornik doesn’t end up making the deal, and he initially attributes it to his approach. Was he too generous, too friendly? This case is a perfect opener, because it demonstrates both of the potential outcomes that givers can experience. Nice guys—givers—can certainly finish last. However, Grant later supplies a valuable coda to this story. After a few months had passed, Hornik received an offer to buy in to his friend’s startup. It turned out that his giver attitude (not to mention his reputation for success) were too irresistible in the long run. And this is an essential point: givers might lose some in the short term, but they usually win in the long term.

Throughout Give and Take, Grant gives a 360-degree perspective of givers and takers. He demonstrates the importance of distinguishing givers from takers and fakers, and how to operate like a giver without simply becoming a conduit for a selfish acquaintance’s will. And while you might feel compelled to help solve everyone’s problems, that compulsion might also harm you in the process, so he offers advice to givers to avoid the risk of being stretched too thin.

This whole idea of operating like a giver is especially relevant today. Many workers don’t consider themselves to be part of a team in the workplace. We might have inherited our parents’ or grandparents’ worldview, based on a manufacturing economy in which most workers operated independently of each other, completing their own tasks. The American economy today is more service-oriented than ever. According to Grant, more than 80% of Americans now work in the service sector. Whether we realize it or not, we are often working with people to produce results for people. How we interact with people on all sides of our work is exactly the point at which we can consider Give and Take.

Maybe “How will you get ahead?” is not the question to be asking. Instead, ask yourself, “How can I help?”

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan, Bard Press, 240 pages, $24.95, Hardcover, April 2013, ISBN 9781885167774

Many people consider multitasking a modern skill, or even necessity, that results in higher productivity, revealing one’s level of ability, improvisation, and creativity. In truth, the efficacy of multitasking is a myth. When we do many things at once, each task is done with limited effort. This same fallacy is true in terms of vision. We often think our vision can support a wide range of ideas, but instead, its power is diminished when we branch out into too many arenas.

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan’s new book, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, argues that we need to focus on “ONE thing” rather than many things, both in terms of action and vision.

You only have so much time and energy, so when you spread yourself out, you end up spread thin. […] The problem with trying to do too much is that even if it works, adding more to your work and your life without cutting anything brings a lot of bad with it: missed deadlines, disappointing results, high stress, long hours, lost sleep, poor diet, no exercise, and missed moments with family and friends—all in the name of going after something that is easier to get than you might imagine.

And that is what this book promises: to make success easier for you to achieve. It is a book about finding and following one’s singular passion, and a practical guide to narrowing in on what tasks really contribute to success. The authors ask us to envision a line of standing dominos, telling us that when you focus on the “ONE thing,” it’s like a line of dominos that increases in size. That one regular-sized domino can knock down increasingly big dominos.

To discover your ONE thing, Keller and Papasan suggest you ask yourself this question:

What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

That’s the trick: your one thing must have a direct influence and impact on all the other things on your to-do list. And you can apply this process to any area of your life that feels overwhelming or unfulfilling. By “going small,” we can ask better questions, find more useful answers, and manage our work and life in ways that will bring us the same fulfillment faster (and less stressfully) than trying to do everything at once, or doing too much too soon.

The One Thing is as much a book on what not to do as it is a book about what to do. It has an incredible amount of insight into productivity, and how our productivity is tied to our energy and health. And the good news is, with this book in hand, we can start doing it (and stop trying to do too much) right now.

The Athena Doctrine: How Women (And the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future by John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio, Jossey-Bass, 304 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, April 2013, ISBN 9781118452950

The Athena Doctrine is a strange hybrid of a book. In one way it’s prescriptive: feminine leadership qualities are valued around the world, and men and women can learn from the stories told within to approach their work with traditionally female traits such as flexibility, empathy, and honesty. In another way, it’s social science commentary in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell and statistical research ala Gallup. To top it off, it is also an international adventure story with two knowledgeable, humorous, and humane guys for your guides.

The authors, who proved their statistician bonafides with their popular book Spend Shift, surveyed 64,000 people around the globe and found that 66% of adults agree that the “world would be a better place if men thought more like women.” They then went back to that well of respondents and asked half of them to define a lengthy list of qualities as masculine, feminine, or neutral. And they asked the other half to simply rate that same list of qualities in terms of importance (with no mention of gender). The results?

When all the data from thirteen countries came back in, across age, gender and culture, people around the world feel that feminine traits correlate more strongly with making the world a better place.

Motivated by the results of the study, Gerzema and D’Antonio set out on a journey around the world to find examples of the Athena doctrine at work. The stories they feature are organized by country, which include Iceland, Israel, Kenya, and even Bhutan. Here is where The Athena Doctrine veers from its expected course. The authors don’t spend the bulk of the book defending their thesis, or even explicitly touting the feminine traits. Instead, they let the stories—about women and men making change around the globe—speak for themselves via their journalistic yet charming narrative-cum-travelogue.

So what does the Athena doctrine look like in practice? It looks like two men in Great Britain who react to the depressed economic state of the country by providing rental cars with included insurance and unparalleled technological ease. The difference from other car swapping companies? WhipCar renters actually meet the owners of the car, and this human connection engenders trust and responsibility. It looks like Eriko Yamaguchi who, empathizing with struggling populations due a childhood in which she was bullied, performed an internet search to find the poorest country in Asia, Bangladesh, and enrolled in graduate school there to learn firsthand why its people struggle. Observing the skills of workers manufacturing textile products but that also struggle with poor wages, she opened her own factory to produce high-end, quality handbags to be sold in Japan that could generate enough profit to pay the workers well and invest in their continued growth.

The stories are multitudinous within each country’s chapter, so you meet numerous leaders—influencers in both large and small ways—whose stories are interwoven. To conclude the book, the authors also include a more straightforward presentation of Athena-style leadership qualities, such as: Nurturing and understanding; Others before self; Empathy as Catalyst; Winning is plural; Sharing versus extraction; and Vulnerability as strength.

Now let me tell you what The Athena Doctrine is not: it is not just for women and I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t tell you that. As you can see from my description above, this is a book for everyone, and I have no doubt that your life and your work will be enriched by reading it.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin, The Penguin Press, 400 pages, $29.95, Hardcover, April 2013, ISBN 9781594204623

Central banks are among the world’s most powerful, complicated, and controversial institutions. They are also some of the world’s most secretive and least understood organizations, which makes Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire such an important addition to our bookshelves.

The central story of the book follows how the world’s three leading bankers—Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank—handled a global crisis of confidence in the foundations of modern capitalism, a system they and their predecessors not only have had great power over, but one they had largely created.

To understand how they had gained such incredible power, Irwin takes us back to the birth of central banking in mid-seventeenth century Sweden, through the ascendency of the City of London at the height of the British Empire, moves through the long, uneven, and contentious development of central banks in the Unites States, and makes clear the role European central bankers had in the lead-up to both of the 20th century’s world wars.

The further you read, the more you begin to understand the title of the book:

The alchemists of medieval times never did figure out a way to create gold from tin, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter. A central bank, imbued with power from the state and a printing press, had the same power. With that power, it creates the very underpinnings of modernity. As surely as electric utilities and sewer systems make modern cities possible, the flow of money enabled by central banks makes a modern economy possible.

It all started rather poorly when a charismatic man with a checkered past changed his name to Johan Palmstruch, moved to Sweden and gained the confidence of its most powerful men to became the world’s first central banker. He was a financial innovator that would provide the liquidity the Swedish trading empire needed by issuing paper bank notes in lieu of their standard “coins,” which were cumbersome, copper daler (note its similarity to the word dollar) plates that weighed more than forty pounds. Those paper notes would eventually lose their value as they were overprinted, lost any relationship to the daler plates that were supposed to be held in the bank to back them—which had themselves been lent out—and people lost confidence in the man and institution behind him, causing a run on the bank. But the liquidity Palmstruch provided was a powerful lubricant, and though his bank failed, the idea stuck. The central bank set up in 1668 in the aftermath of Palstruch’s debacle would eventually become the Sveriges Riksbank, which remains Sweden’s central bank today.

The world has changed drastically since then, but central bankers’ main job is still to create and destroy money—or manage financial liquidity—and maintain confidence in the system.

The actual work of creating or destroying money in modern times is as banal as it is powerful: a handful of midlevel workers sit at a computer on the ninth floor of the New York Fed building in lower Manhattan, or on Threadneedle Street in the City of London, or at the German Bundesbank in Frankfurt, and buy or sell securities with the stroke of their keyboards. They are carrying out orders of policy-setting committees led by their central bankers. When they buy bonds, it is with money that previously did not exist; when they sell, those dollars or pounds or euros cease to exist.

The history of the central banks has been checkered at best, and contrary to revealing a model of behavior, it is an ever-evolving lesson in management. The three bankers at the heart of this book learned a great deal from past failures and have so far managed to largely weather the storm and prevent another great depression. Irwin’s book is an exciting history of those events and an excellent analysis that shows what future bankers and business people can learn from their failures and the pursuit of such alchemy.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg; Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $24.95, Hardcover; March 2013, ISBN 9780385349949

The COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most powerful women in business, and as such is a leader not only at the top of her organization, but also to other women in business. Neither is an easy role, and Sandberg gets criticized for her work in both spheres. (The amount of media chatter about this, her first book, is cacophonous.) But she also reaps the benefits, and is the first to say that her advantages are exactly what behooved her to write this book.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a pragmatic, and even sometimes anthemic, book that began as a TEDTalk in 2010. The same intelligent and intimate voice she employed in her talk drives this book as well. Sandberg doesn’t hesitate to share from her life the stories and struggles she has both observed and experienced as one of the few women in such organizations as Google and Facebook—as well as during her time at the World Bank and the Treasury Department. From her seat on the front lines, Sandberg acknowledges the generally female-unfriendly culture of boardrooms, but makes a credible argument for women to take control of what they can change: themselves.

Lean In begins with a chapter titled, “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?” Sandberg believes that it is fear that causes women to undermine their own ambitions:

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.

To nullify that fear, Sandberg compels women to “Sit at the Table,” “Don’t Leave Before You Leave,” and “Make Your Partner a Real Partner.” Every well-researched chapter focuses on one change of behavior that can shore up a woman’s will to strive. In “Seek and Speak Your Truth,” after a rather self-deprecating story about crying while talking with her boss Mark Zuckerberg about a personal affront, she hints at the way in which women make things harder for themselves than they need to. Often, women feel like they need to leave their home lives at home or their emotions tucked away, but Sandberg thinks that is not the case.

It has been an evolution, but I am now a true believer in bringing our whole selves to work. I no longer think people have a professional self for Mondays through Fridays and a real self for the rest of the time. That type of separation probably never existed, and in today’s era of individual expression … it makes even less sense.

If the chapter titles and the passage directly above sound like some practical advice for all working people, it’s because it is. Lean In, despite being obviously directed toward helping women succeed, is, at its core, simply a book about success… for both genders. And is, in fact, a book that can and should be read by both.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Crown Business, 320 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, March 2013, ISBN 9780307956392

Each day, all day, we make decisions. Often, these many decisions are simple: what to wear, where to eat, and how best to churn through the tasks on our to-do list. Sometimes the stakes are higher: how should we address an employee issue, should we make a career change, or do we stay the course with our business plan? In either case, we generally narrow the choices down to two solutions, create a mental list of pros and cons, and make our decision based on the results.

According to Chip and Dan Heath’s new book, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, we’re doing it all wrong. Our gut instincts are loaded with bias, and the pros and cons we create—even though our intent is to be objective—are based on those biased gut reactions:

Generating distinct options is even more difficult when our minds settle into certain well-worn grooves. Two of those grooves are common states of mind, studied widely by researchers, that play a role in almost every decision we make. One is triggered when we think about avoiding bad things, and one is triggered when we think about pursuing good things. When we’re in one state, we tend to ignore the other.

Instead, the Heaths recommend building a process by which to make better decisions. To start, they quote Steve Cole, VP of R&D at HopeLab, who said, “Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?” This kind of broader thinking about a situation is what the authors find an innovative, more risk-averse method of deciding what to do. From there, the Heaths explore a variety of process building scenarios: consider opposites, find previous solutions to the same problem, overcome short-term emotion, and more. And with each scenario, they present real examples of these processes (and their outcomes) in action.

Those who have read the Heaths’ previous books, Made to Stick and Switch, know they are great writers. Their books are filled with clever stories, detailed research told in a relatable way, and as a result, each page simply makes you think, and think more clearly. But what elevates their books above many others is that they operate both as “how-to” guides as well as social insight. You can read them to change what you do or how you think, and in the process, you’ll understand the world a bit better. Because decision-making is one of the great challenges for leaders, entrepreneurs, and really anyone trying to manage a career, this book is an important one.

How Stella Saved the Farm: A Wild and Wooly Yarn About Making Innovation Happen by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, St. Martins Press, 160 pages, $19.98, Hardcover, March 2013, ISBN 9781250002129

I was surprised to see that two of the most respected and knowledgeable business book authors writing today, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, wrote a parable. The team—both faculty at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth—has previously written three more academic-leaning books together, and their 2012 book Reverse Innovation appeared on numerous best-of lists. So, why the parable now? Perhaps it’s because turning theory into story can reach an entirely new audience, as this book should.

Here’s the scenario: Animals have taken over running all the small “family” farms, and humans run huge factory farms. Humans, however, want to buy up all the smaller farms, and the animals want to prevent this because the worker-animals on the human farms are treated unfairly. On this particular farm, the (horse) CEO has moved on and bequeathed the running of the farm to his (horse) daughter, Deidre, who is (the sheep) Stella’s mentor. Deidre’s promotion is a surprise and puts her at odds with the farm manager (a bull) who expected to take over for the late CEO, but was overlooked due to his more traditional approach to business.

Clearly the farm is in danger, and obviously there is a bad guy (human) who would like to snatch it up. This puts pressure on the farm to do some quick innovating.

They hold a contest, and Stella’s suggestion of introducing a new, rather “foreign” revenue stream to the farm is chosen as one of the changes. Drama (and lots of ground pawing) commences. Does Stella and her innovative idea save the farm? The authors suggest early on that just because the book is named after Stella doesn’t mean she actually did save the farm. Numerous other characters contribute to the attempts to innovate, so the suspense remains high to the end.

I’ll admit, as I was reading, I began to think about the independent bookstores we’ve seen wither under the assault of first the super-stores and now the online monolith, Amazon.

Overall, Deidre determined, the farm was operating as efficiently as ever. That was the good news. But prices for the farm’s products were dropping across the board, squeezing profits. If current trends continued, Windsor [farm] could be forced out of business in just a few years.

In other words, I could relate—which is exactly what Govindarajan and Trimble set out to do with this parable. This tale enables the authors to share their theories of innovation with any reader who learns better or engages more intimately through story, even if the story features farm animals at the helm. Additionally, as I was reading, I started to come around to the idea that these animals (hooved, but able to type!) were actually fine representatives for those of us who feel handcuffed when fighting against companies with more money and more power.

Govindarajan and Trimble offer us an insightful little book laced with humor and clever little details that make for entertaining reading. Will you need to suspend disbelief that there are custom-made desks for horses? Yes, but you will not need to struggle through a lengthy academic thesis to access the pragmatic lessons the authors make clear through the struggles of this charming little farm. They also offer a list of review questions and ponderables at the end of the book to get you thinking about the many layers of lessons woven into the story. And this last section allows readers to become a very important part of the story.