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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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