Bright-Sided

I read Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich for a non-fiction book club in NJ (hopefully I will be able to make future meetings of this splinter book club).

Overall, I liked the book and Ehrenreich's challenge to a standard part of the American psyche made a lot of sense to me. I think that the idea of positive thinking started out with good intentions - when you are mired in negativity, it's hard to get out of it and when you believe things can turn around they can. But thinking positively will not raise you out of poverty, will not cure an illness. And thinking something certainly doesn't manifest it into being (The Secret, the law of attraction).

When I finished the book I thought, thank you Ms. Ehrenreich for saying it's okay to not be positive all the time. That to have bad moments or negative thoughts is what makes us human. I have so many friends who have experienced challenges in life and the pressure they feel (and I too have felt) to keep up the happy facade is heartbreaking.

When we discussed the book at book club, I heard some differing views and it did alter some of my opinions about certain sections. There was discussion that Ehrenreich was still angry about the experiences she had when writing Nickel and Dimed and this was really a diatribe against the American class system.

I agree that there was an underlying feeling of frustration, but in the end I would still recommend the book to friends, especially those who have experienced some loss or adversity in life. I would hope they would experience what I did - a little understanding into why we as Americans encourage each other to "turn that frown upside down" and why that's not necessarily healthy or helpful to our development as people and a country.