However much money they saved by not printing the footnotes that they reference in the text, it wasn’t enough. This book is not for smart people, but is probably targeting dumb people that want to feel smart. But it won’t work, because even dumb people will realize this book is dumb.
If you picked up this book because you were looking for an insightful well-written overview of current brain health research, you’re going to be disappointed. As a general rule, whenever an author lists ‘PhD’ after their name on the cover, the book is probably lacking. While I’ve read a lot of books by people that have a PhD, I have never read a good book by an author that felt it was necessary to inform the reader that they had one.
Milstein’s age-proof brain falls flat in just about every category, and reads like an extra-credit assignment from an eager high school student. The analysis is shallow, and reads as little more than an endless list of correlations gleaned from many, many abstracts. The author does not offer much insight or even convince the reader that he has any kind of in-depth understanding of the material. It’s almost as if he just read a bunch of abstracts and pasted the results into the text. There is very little assessment or criticism of the studies he mentions, nor does he do a particularly good job of casting these results in the context of our current understanding of the field. While I was reading it, I really got the feeling that this is what an Large Language Model AI would come up with if you had assigned it one chapter at a time, based on the title. You’ll walk away being unconvinced that anything in the book was particularly true or that the author’s interpretation of the cited research is reliable.
For me, the most offensive thing about this book was its lack of references in the print edition. That’s right, while there are superscripts without the footnotes. This is so remarkable and in such bad form that I don’t blame you for not completely understanding: He wrote little numbers, as superscripts, in the text where references should be, but those references are nowhere to be found in the book. The reader is expected to refer to the ‘online resources’ at https://drmarcmilstein.com/APBnotes. It is hard for me to express the potency of the contempt I feel for this practice, and it was not terribly surprising to me that when I attempted to visit the site, just four years after the book’s publication, the page was not available. This book was published in 2022, and when I tried to go to the website referenced in the book, I got this page:
While it is possible to navigate to the actual references from this broken page, it gives a good feel for the lack of professionalism the reader can expect from this work. There were about four references that I was interested in following up on after having plowed through this unpleasant mass of sub-mediocrity; the studies were all accompanied with hyperlinks, 3 of which were broken. [UPDATE: upon revisiting the site, I found that these three broken links were… well, broken. Interestingly, the url spanned two lines, and whoever set up the reference page… I don’t know. Didn’t know how to ‘do computers.’ If you click on the link, it will not work, but if you copy and paste the whole url, then the link will bring you to the study in question. Yes, that means that apparently no one involved in the publication of this book or the set-up of the ‘online resources’ ever checked these links to make sure they worked. Which is more than a little disappointing. Shout-out to BenBella Books: You suck!]
It bothers me that this book was published, or that people bought it (I borrowed it from the library). Do not pay money for this book. And if you are interested in the topic, find another book that addresses the subject, because this one, in general, is a waste of time (and paper).
But what, you might ask, does the author write about for over 200 pages? Well, mostly the author makes a lot of generalizations and non-committal suggestions. To paraphrase, “Diet and excercise are important!” “Get enough sleep!” “Quality of sleep is important, too!” “Don’t stress too much!” If that unremarkable dribble isn’t enough to make you want to throw up or punch something, the author’s unimpressive and annoying attempts at humor might push you into the punch-or-vomit-zone.
The one benefit of this book was that it motivated me to read faster. Yes, perhaps I should have just stopped reading the book when it was clear that it was such a poorly compiled attempt. But I read the whole thing, in part so that I could be sure that I could assure others: yes, I read the whole thing – and no, it’s not worth your time.