A review by jeaniegreenie
Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey

2.0

I think that there are a lot of great moments to learn in this book, but I feel like it ended up being to idealistic and painfully repetitive. I think the jist of this book could be gathered within the first 30 minutes to an hour of the audiobook. The author is very pleasant to listen to, but I feel like most people would be pleasant to listen to if they delivered a speech in a sermon-like, idealistic way. This is another major issue I had with this book. Everything is very Christian-centric, even though the author claims to want this message of rest to be delivered secularly. She also loses credibility on her message of secularism when she talks about accepting to let the chips fall where they will to regain rest, and have "faith" this will be good essentially. Also a lot of credibility is lost with such a Christian-centric narrative when Christianity in America is such a major proponent of capitalism that has robbed us of our ability to rest. I also was not a fan of the author creating this narrative that taking time to rest is not a privilege, while also talking about taking a 30 day sabbatical in the same book. Sure, she did provide ways to take short amounts of rest in our everyday, which I appreciated, but I feel overall she has a very unrealistic and inaccessible message for the modern world, as sad as that may be. Idk, maybe I'm too jaded by the state of the world, but I found this manifesto to be lacking any grounding in reality. But, again, there are some tidbits of learning and reflection to gain from this, I was just overall disappointed in what I thought would be a top read for me this year. Sadly, it may end up being one of my lower rated reads this year.