Barbara Ehrenreich
It’s a great title for a work of fiction. Shame then that it isn’t but left me thinking perhaps it’s time to read a little fiction!
At barely two hundred pages this is not a book that outstays its welcome in terms of length but it has pushed me into thinking that perhaps I’ve read enough of the “world needs more empiricism and less conventional wisdom” type books. I think I’m in need of Jeffrey Archer. Oh Barbara, what have you done?
Is it a book you should read? Yes it is. Is it a good book? No, in many ways it is so very much less than the sum of its parts and that’s a shame.
Fundamentally this book is about a single idea. That idea can be simply expressed… and it is… as the notion that there is a cult of “positive thinking” which is both damaging and standing in the way of real progress in many areas.
As a thesis I have no problem with this idea. Indeed it’s fair to say that the argument is cogently put with plenty of entertaining anecdote to keep you trundling along. At the end though there is a profound sense of not so much the author having failed to put the case as having failed to provide the level of detail that is surely out there and which an argument such as this surely deserves. I;m thinking here of the likes of “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein. It may have been a dense, intense read but you sure as heck couldn’t argue it was lacking in factual detail. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the sense you get here. A very strong sense that there was so much more to be said.
Now, some of this may be down to Ehrenreich having an audience which Klein does not and consequently wanting to write in terms which they might understand and appreciate. Fair enough if that is the case. Incredibly patronising me if it is not. Either way, in my opinion there is a great and possibly shocking book to be written on this subject and I am slightly saddened that this is not it. Saddened even more that this feels like someone with something important to say but slightly out of their depth in saying it.
There’s enough thought provoking material here to make a book two to three times the length of this. Perhaps no-one would wish to read it and perhaps that’s where the authors judgement is better than mine but I have the sense of a series of high quality Readers Digest articles being compiled rather than an academic subject being made palatable.
One look at the topics covered by the various chapter titles should tell you there’s a rich seam of material to be mined here but in the midst of almost each and every chapter there’s a sense of the author taking a breath, as if to say, now what was I talking about again? What was my point? Thus the ball is fumbled whilst in very important and thought-provoking territory indeed. The evolution of magical realism until it morphed into, or was absorbed by, the multi-million pound (well, okay, dollar) industry we have today, should make for truly terrifying reading. That it only makes for an entertaining read with a little bit of provocation thrown in is probably my point.
The same could be said when it comes to looking at how religion and capitalism work together in America today or the positive psychology movement. Crucially of course this means that by the time we get to the bit about how recent world financial troubles have a root cause based in the authors theory well, I want to believe it, and there’s some good stuff in there, but… and this for me is a very big but… it all feels just a little glib.
Ultimately, a disappointment.
