What I've Read: Bright-Sided

Just because I've haven't posted any book reviews lately doesn't mean I've given up the written word. Far from it. I just took the summer months to crush through a whole bunch of books from the fiction writers I love, and since those don't have the same umph as the nonfiction I spend a majority of time reading, I thought hey weren't review worthy.

But I'm back on my nonfiction kick, and I started off with a good one. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my favs. She's got a great reporting style to bring her theses to life. In several of her past books that I really enjoyed (Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch), she didn't just talk about the problems facing middle class families, she took jobs in the same industries that many laid-off workers were having to take to see how the economics took their tool on them. Good reads, check them out.

In Bright-Sided, she goes head-first into the uber-sketchy positive thinking industry. As someone who is often thought of as a grouch in the family and always pushing depressing and serious and non-reality TV viewing, this was right up my alley. She first tackles the subject of her breast cancer diagnosis, and how those who have been diagnosed are almost forced to swallow nothing but positive imagery and the belief that if they think and pray enough, their cancer will somehow magically disappear. It's a startling look into how that "fighting cancer industry" is hellbent on only celebrating survivors and not those fighting it with the same passion, and how anyone who dares have a bad day or a negative chemo session is blasted for being human and having negative thoughts.

After breaking that down, she moves on to other solid territory, giving you a history of the positive thinking movement and its founders during the early part of the 1900s. She gives some great history into the hucksters and other jagoffs who created this idea that you can think yourself rich and successful. Once the history lesson is over, Ehrenreich gets right back into the good stuff, going after the Joel Osteens and other success preachers of the day that are preying and outright spewing bullshit to get their congregations to pray for more money, because as she claims, "god wants you to be rich."

She closes the book discussing how the positive thinking industry relied heavily on corporations and HR departments to build their successes, and more importantly how they began feeding off each other until company leaders and Fortune 500s were insulated to never listen to contradictory advice or filling their ranks with realists. She posits that it's this cycle that helped contribute to the economic collapse, and she makes some good points though rushes through it a bit too fast to make the impression stick.

In all, a fast read that will make you honestly reconsider a lot of the messages you hear from your HR department or from others. Plus, it makes you feel good about hating all the Amway bullshit and any other fake-ass pyramid scheme shit out there that promises happiness and good health and just by having good thoughts. Sounds like the kind of shit those infomercials peddle at 3 a.m. and what they preach about on Sundays before heading back to their mansions. Oh yeah, that's because it is.