Brennan’s new Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia. It’s fantastic! I already have my dream job for life, and I still couldn’t put it down. Brennan calmly and crisply cuts through piles of misconceptions, lame rationalizations, and mountains of Social Desirability Bias to tell would-be professors the cold, hard truth about their would-be occupation.
Good Work could just as easily be called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Becoming a Professor… But Were Afraid to Ask.. He describes the main types of academic jobs, including the multitudinous low-status positions that excellent students rarely encounter first hand… but often end up occupying after grad school. He teaches backwards induction: figure out where you want to end up, then line your ducks up in reverse order to reach your goal.
From a book review by Brian Kaplan: