New Book: An Evil Side to 'Positive Thinking'?

As one who found the book, Who Moved My Cheese?, to be incredibly condescending, Kerry Howley's review of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, is sufficient to ensure that this blogger will find that book and read it. The review is published in Reason and we found it via The Chronicle of Higher Education's Arts & Letters Daily. If you purchase the book through this link at Amazon, SCUP will receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Ehrenreich weighs down her argument with dubious chains of causation and ponderous overstatement, but her central point still shines through the mess. Platitudinous happy-talk seems so harmless that most of us barely notice it, yet it can be a burdensome, even bullying, attempt to enforce emotional conformity.

Ehrenreich is always interesting, always comes from a politically progressive perspective, and the processes by which she comes to conclusions are often easy to disagree with. But she makes unique and thought-provoking observations about our culture.

We think a planner would find her observations about the ubiquity of positive thinking, and its "cultural pressure so totalizing we sometimes fail to notice its existence," of interest in organizing and observing stakeholder meetings, focus groups, and the like.

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• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
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