Bright-Sided

Bright-Sided

2009 • 206 pages • 7h 27m

Ratings19

Average rating3.5

15

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.

September 1, 2014Report this review