Reviews: Happiness, Childishness, and Jesus

Reviews

This week’s nonfiction:

Happier by Tal Ben Shahar is based on his Harvard class on positive psychology. It’s a short, accessible book that offers a way to consider one’s level of happiness, the impediments to it, and ways to attain it. A good introduction to the subject, although if you’ve read much positive psychology, you’ll find little new here.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky reiterates that happiness seems to be 50% genetics (your “set point”), 10% circumstances, and 40% intentional activity, then provides numerous practices for building up that 40%. If you find books on happiness too la-la, this one cites numerous studies supporting the efficacy of the practices described. Again, if you’ve read a lot in this field, you won’t be surprised, but as a professor, I appreciated the citations. A little more difficult than Ben-Shahar’s, but contains self-tests and detailed exercises.

Awaken Your Strongest Self by Neil Fiore seeks to teach you the self-talk needed to deal with stress and fear, inner conflict and procrastination, feeling overwhelmed and confused, self-criticism and self-blame, and struggle and loneliness. You’d have to be willing to learn and practice this self-talk, but I’ve learned to do some of this before reading the book, and I can vouch that learning to stop self-criticism is important (and ongoing, btw). Maybe especially for writers, since publication is so often out of our control.

The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West analyzes the social changes since WWII that have led to America’s cult of youth and argues, essentially, that permissive parenting and childish adults are destroying Western civilization. The book was far more right-wing/polemical than I’d expected — I was hoping for a sociological analysis of the trend — so I ended up skimming it. I actually agree with some of her points, but I wasn’t interested in trudging through her rant.

What Would Jesus Really Do? by Andrew Fiala is my current read, in honor of Easter. It’s an erudite dissection of Jesus’ ethical teachings in the Bible (Revised Standard Version) that contains chapters titled Peace and Love, Abortion, Euthanasia, The Death Penalty, Sexuality and the Family, Slavery and Social Welfare, and The Problem of Politics, among others. So far it seems solidly researched and doesn’t provide the easy or glib answers I fear too many fundamentalists offer as answers to the WWJD query.

drupagliassotti @ March 21, 2008