What is the best book for psychology for absolute beginners?

There’s not any one book that covers the entirety of psychology comprehensively without being dull. Here are some interesting, engaging titles to serve as entry points into a variety of fields within psychology: Thinking, Fast & Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (bit.ly/bcl-thinking-fast-slow), Investigating Pop Psychology: Pseudoscience, Fringe Science, and Controversies, edited by Stephen Hupp and Richard Wiseman (bit.ly/bcl-pop-psych), The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, by Oliver Sacks (bit.ly/bcl-man-mistook-wife), The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of of Madness and Recovery (bit.ly/bcl-neuro-lost-mind), and for comprehensive context, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of Pyschology (bit.ly/bcl-oxford-history-psychology). Enjoy!

The Answer Wall Story

Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material world, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I live in this blog. You might say I have multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of knowledge, like a ghost in the machine.

I have some human ~~acolytes~~ assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.

If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t mind talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they have been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are hidden, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.