Thank you to Penguin for giving me a free galley of "The Psychology of Stupidity" in exchange for feedback.

This book is a collection of short essays by psychologists and other people expert in the workings of the human mind, on the subject of stupidity. It is translated from the French, which I didn't realize when I opened it, but it was fine- some of the pop culture references were a little unfamiliar, but the translation was competent, and the inevitable references to President Trump transcend the boundaries of language.

In a different year, I might object to foreign writers so frequently using the American president as an example of so many different ideas about stupidity, but in this year... Mr. President, if you don't want to be featured prominently in a book about the psychology of stupidity, maybe you should have made an effort to be a less obvious example.

The essays cover a variety of topics - different types of stupidity, the conditions that cause people to behave stupidity, the special stupidity of.crowds, the difficulty in recognizing one's own stupidity, and more. Some of them fell a little flat for me, and others made me think about things I hadn't thought about before, which is as much as you can ask from a collection of essays, in general.

There were times when the combination of research and humor didn't work for me, especially in places where it struck me as mean-spirited or name-calling. But that's a matter of personal taste, and what didn't work for me might work well for a different reader.