Bright-Sided

I like Ehrenreich. She can seem cynical, but I really think she's not a killjoy at heart. She's an optimist of the best kind, who thinks that things can get better, but aren't going to on their own, so we might as well take a good, hard look at what's going wrong. So, if you're curious to find out what pastors of megachurches, the inane author of “The Secret,” positive psychologists, and Wall Street have in common (or if you're just in the mood for a well-written, timely, and not-too-long work of non-fiction), definitely check this out. Ehrenreich is mordant and sly at her best, which is often, but only when people deserve it (ahem, Martin Seligman).

Hmmm... I mean, I definitely agree with her basic thesis that The Secret and other “positive psychology” pseudoscience is bogus. That said, I didn't love this book? It's interesting–she rightly criticized The Secret and other self-help books for just being random strings of anecdotes, but this was... also kind of that? I got the sense that she did more research than she used, and I think maybe I would have appreciated it if she'd gone in deeper about some things, like her visit to Joel Osteen's church? Or, for that matter, about her own personal experience as a breast cancer patient who felt infantilized by all the extremely positive cancer speak (eg people saying cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them, because it taught them how strong they are.)

Still, it's a good resource that does have some science to debunk (or just highlight) a lot of the nonsense that's out there.