Ideal for Eat, Pray, Love fans in search of positive psychological theory.
An amateur scholar’s personal exploration of the science of joy, and what her findings mean for American women.
When Hip Mama founding editor Gore (How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead, 2007, etc.) heard on NPR that Harvard’s new Positive Psychology class was pushing the enrollment limit, she dug up her happiness diary from college. The journal was inspired by psychotherapist Marion Milner’s book project of recording and analyzing moments of happiness in her life. Similarly, Bluebird chronicles Gore’s ups and downs in her personal quest for happiness, including one pregnancy at 18 and another planned with her partner at 37 (the latter coincides with the writing of the book). The book is also a distillation of the history of happiness studies, with commentary on America’s and women’s unique relationship with the emotion. These more substantive chapters, each commencing with a journal quotation from a member of Gore’s everyday “council of experts,” alternate with chapters comprised of select responses she elicited from 100 women to questions like “How heavily do you weigh happiness when making life decisions?” Nearly all happiness studies cite gratitude and selflessness as keys to contentment. Hedonic adaptation theory holds that humans have a set range for happiness, determined more by genetics than by changes in life circumstances. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes happiness as “flow” or optimal experience—being completely, unselfconsciously absorbed in a task. Women, however, according to statistics on depression—which are a closed circle and inherently flawed, Gore says—seem to have a harder time achieving happiness. In discussing America’s addiction to antidepressants, the author occasionally slips into oversimplified diatribes that reveal her California hippie upbringing and undermine her otherwise convincing points. She concludes that “[h]appiness, like some central seed, is actually contained within the pursuit.”
Ideal for Eat, Pray, Love fans in search of positive psychological theory.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-11489-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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