Consider a book-Books worth reading

  In part, this is a review of the material in the Decisive Battles of World History, in part, it's a review of The great courses. Specifically, it's not a book; It's explicitly a "lecture series". It's clearly segmented into 40  30-minute lectures. Typically, a traditional book has chapters deeply interconnected with one another, built on a plot or theme that gives the volume a sense of continuity. In this course, each lecture covers a single battle with relatively little connecting it to other lectures.This means that listening can be more spaced out (you don't need fresh details in your mind) but it also means that the content doesn't sink in as well (much less interleaved retrieval). The content was interesting but not very impactful. The most interesting part was the argument for the importance of each battle relative to other battles in history. The idea is that each battle in the series had an uncertain outcome with significant cultural, religio

  This is another Great Courses lecture series (GCLS). Here's my review on Great Courses vs. books. The overall concept is pretty good. Satterfield, besides having a cool name, seems to know his stuff. I'd say this course serves as a round introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy, though it seems to be intended as something of a self-help foundation. Given the bifurcated focus of the book, it comes as no surprise that a lot of the information isn't really all that interesting or necessary. Unlike the last GCLS, CBT suffers from a lack of stories, dropping it way out of the inspirational half of our quadrant.  The information is pretty good, but nothing earth-shattering. CBT, in a nutshell, is "thoughts, actions, feelings, they go round and round, one leads to another, this is what I've found"(source unknown). Satterfield describes the mechanisms connecting each point of the triangle and provides specific examples and illustrations of interventions that can