|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
by Ehrenreich, Barbara
|
| |
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Americans are a "positive" people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told.
In this utterly original debunking, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worst of all, to the business community, where the refusal to consider negative outcomes--like mortgage defaults--contributed directly to the current economic disaster. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of positive thinking: personal self-blame and national denial. This is Ehrenreich at her provocative best--poking holes in conventional wisdom and faux science and ending with a call for existential clarity and courage. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of numerous books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. In Bright-sided, Barbara Ehrenreich reveals how the positive thinking movement, though seemingly harmless, has in fact deluded America and played a role in some of the most destructive events in recent U.S. history. Far from just a ?healthy mindset,” bright-siding is an epidemic of self-deception that has spread to all circles of American life, from preachers who celebrate the power of prayer, to doctors who promote optimism’s healing abilities. It led officials to overlook clues of 9/11 and overestimate the strength of New Orleans’ levees, and enabled the business world to make egregiously unsafe loans that caused the worst financial crisis since World War II. Ehrenreich exposes the consequences of the belief that positive thinking is the key to achieving success and prosperity?a notion which, at its most dangerous, prevents people from even considering the negative outcomes of major events or their own actions. ?In this hard-hitting but honest appraisal, America’s cultural skeptic Barbara Ehrenreich turns her focus on the muddled American phenomenon of positive thinking. She exposes the pseudoscience and pseudointellectual foundation of the positive-thinking movement for what it is: a house of cards. This is a mind-opening read.”?Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time "Barbara Ehrenreich wants to make clear that she is not a spoilsport. 'No one can call me a sourpuss,' she declared. 'I have a big foot in the joy camp.' She is the author of Dancing in the Streets, a history of 'collective joy,' she notes, and a lot of fun at parties. So her new book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant. It is serious social history.Many of the 17 books that Ms. Ehrenreich has written during the past three and half decades have taken her into alien worlds. In her fantastically successful 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed, for example, she details her experience of trying to get by on the salary of an unskilled, minimum-wage worker. By contrast, this newest volume is based on her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients . . . In Bright-sided, she traces the roots of the nation’s blithe sunniness to a reaction against Calvinist gloom and the limits of medical science in the first half of the 19th century. Starting with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, perhaps one of the first American New Age faith healers, she draws a line to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science; the psychologist William James; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Norman Vincent Peale, who published The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952; and the toothy television minister Joel Osteen, who preaches the gospel of prosperity."?Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
"When I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, I went in search of a stiff drink?or something that would allow me to escape, if only briefly, the feeling that I have been blind to the unyielding grip that positive thinking has on our culture. Very little I have read elsewhere has suggested that the current recession is good for us, but Ehrenreich implies that the implosion of our economy may bring us to our senses and that reason and common sense might have a chance to disempower the foolish, self-serving and dangerous promotion of positive thinking reaching into all areas of our lives: our health, jobs, science, religion, politics. She is relentless?and persuasive?in her determination to convince us of this. Her notes run to 15 pages of titles of papers, articles, books and television interviews she has researched to support her contentio | | |
Published August, 2010
by Picador, Paperback, 256 Pages, ISBN: 9780312658854, ISBN-10: 0312658850, List Price $18.00.
|
Buy New - $18.99
Buy Used - $8.00
(save $10.00)
Add to Wish List
|
| |
| |
|
Inventory Snapshot |
Princeton --> New for $18.99, Used for $8.00
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|