About the Author

Steven Poole is the award-winning author of Rethink, Unspeak, Trigger Happy, You Aren't What You Eat, and Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower?. He writes a column on language for The Guardian, and his work on ideas and culture also appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Point, The Times Literary Supplement, Edge, and many other publications. He was educated at Cambridge, lived for many years in Paris, and is now based in East London.

Reviews

"A magic carpet ride through the history of thought, viewed from such a height that unexpected patterns and correspondences emerge...It is testament to the author's narrative skill that this whirlwind of discovery doesn't end up in a pile of papers scattered across the floor... His powers of orchestration succeed. Among the greatest compliments you can give a book is that it helps you to see things differently. So long as you're not dazzled by the fireworks, Rethink could do just that."-- "The Guardian"
"An always entertaining and often eye-opening taxonomy of old ideas that refuse to die... I see Rethink as a kind of post-modern, post-ironic smart-thinking book, undercutting the genre's pretensions by borrowing its old clothes, drawing our attention to how its so-called new ones belong to the emperor. This rises far above satire or parody because what Poole actually says is largely both true and interesting. I don't think anyone has subverted the smart-thinking genre like this before. That's inspired rethinking."-- "Financial Times (UK)"
"Fascinating... Exciting... Poole invites us to be a bit bolder than we often are, to challenge accepted truths, to revisit old ideas and even to play with some crazy new ones... Rethink makes you, well, rethink... With this book, Poole confirms his standing as one of our liveliest and most thought-provoking writers on science and technology... A stimulating journey that challenges our fixation with 'winners', but also with novelty for novelty's sake... Rethink invites us to be skeptical and to look back, but perhaps just as important, I think, it also encourages us to be more creative when looking ahead."-- "The Spectator (UK)"