Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.