I wanted to like this book moreIf you studied a field other than science at a college or university which was heavily focused on the sciences, as I did, you'd readily recognize the pattern of this book. But not in a good way.Every aspect of an introductory book should be laid out in straightforward, careful fashion.The author clearly worked toward that goal. Many of the basic concepts are defined in easy-to-understand terms, virtually every concept is supported by an easy-to-understand example. In those ways, this book does, in fairness, remind me of the texts I studied in science courses at my university.Where the book falls short it also reminds me of the texts I studied in science courses at my university.Taking the book as a whole (in a sense, at a systems level), my overall impression of this book's shortcomings is that it does not seem that the author wrote at any meaningful length as part of his day-to-day work, which might be expected from reading his brief biography. It also does not seem that the publisher devoted any meaningful effort to editing the text.It's easy to criticize a text for tangential sentences written without tying up the loose ends of the tangential sentences, faulty subject-verb agreement, lack of parallel structure (all of which are found in this book with some frequency). Those unnecessarily distract from the author's points, but not so badly that the learning points are obscured, they just leave this reader (and expect I speak for more than myself) with minor disappointments about the author's writing abilities and the publisher's lack of meaningful editing effort.More importantly, the arguments in favor of systems thinking are incomplete or disorganized (a few in this book are incomplete, most are complete but the sentences are out of order - sometimes very badly, distracting the reader from the learning points by forcing the reader either to fill in gaps of basic information or to reconstruct paragraphs of out-of-order sentences to make sense of the argument. The gaps and lack of order don't give any impression of being used as a pedagogical tool to force the reader to think, they apparently were simply poor writing. I spend time on them here in this review because, in my experience, the author forced me thru those corrective steps *so* frequently that it was badly distracting from the overall purpose of the book, so much so that I was already struggling halfway thru the book with the idea of finishing the book. After all, I was here for the sake of learning about systems thinking, not to decode what the author meant (which contributed virtually nothing to understanding systems thinking, it only left me less and less interested in the subject) . But for the sake of gleaning as much as I could from the book and having a growing sense that I wanted to write a review of it, I did finish this book.The Conclusion section of the book is truly excellent, it's obvious that the author spent a great deal of time and effort on this, so good that I think it would have worked just as well (maybe even better) in the Introduction section of the book.I think this is a worthy subject (systems affect all of us, and we should all know more about systems thinking), taught by a worthy teacher (he obviously is very bright and knows what he's talking about...if he were teaching in a classroom, I imagine his lectures would be better than the written material), with enough good material to justify 3 stars.If you want good material and don't mind deciphering the writing of a technical mind, this book is for you.19
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