Reviews
Fuck Happiness: How Women Are Ditching the Cult of Positivity and Choosing Radical Joy by Ariel Gore
madzeni's review
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
2.5
The book is very informative on the past research of positive psychology, but only about the last 20-25% of the book was about how women are and can actually become happy and reject "the cult of positivity." It was a little disappointing to me, but still a good enough read.
scholarhect's review against another edition
2.0
Reading as its reissued title "Fuck Happiness", due for publication later this year. It's... good, but not revolutionary. I'd be interested to know whether there were significant rewrites; I somehow doubt it as a lot of the content feels somewhat dated now, and even in 2010, probably wasn't earth-shattering.
For me, the biggest downside is that it's quite a general read (and randomly mentions "psychic notes" amongst scientific studies??). There are interesting ideas but they never seems to go beyond just this - there's no deep treatment of anything. Maybe a good read for someone not overly well versed in psychology or feminist discourse, or someone who prefers their non-fiction in broad brush strokes.
For me, the biggest downside is that it's quite a general read (and randomly mentions "psychic notes" amongst scientific studies??). There are interesting ideas but they never seems to go beyond just this - there's no deep treatment of anything. Maybe a good read for someone not overly well versed in psychology or feminist discourse, or someone who prefers their non-fiction in broad brush strokes.
kp_writ's review
medium-paced
4.5
Some choices in word phrasing and some small sentiments (specifically around mental health) made me step back and question the reliability of the author, but overall a very solid book that was great at reframing the idea of happiness. Maybe my biggest gripe is the book formatting - extremely long chapters with long paragraphs, and my digital version didn't have any indicatiom of when paragraphs were written by the author or were pulled from quotes of research participants.
noonanjohnc's review
3.0
Not the full dissection of Positive Psychology I was hoping for, but an interesting read nonetheless.