Bright-Sided (2009) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Joel Osteen: Pastor of megachurch Lakewood Church, Houston, Texas. Preaches a 'feel good' theology of hope and happiness through faith.
• Norman Vincent Peale: Popular and influential pastor, speaker and author of 'The Power of Positive Thinking'.
• Martin Seligman: Influential American psychologist and father of 'Positive Psychology' as well as the theory of 'learned helplessness.
• Mary Baker Eddy: Founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist (Chrisitan Science), and a leader of the New Thought school of theology.
• Phineas Quimby: Early 'New Thought' thinker who influenced Mary Baker Eddy.
• Rhonda Byrne: Contemporary Australian TV writer/producer and author of New Thought bestseller 'The Secret'.
• Jeffrey Gitomer: Contemporary American author, speaker, and columnist considered a sales 'guru'.
• Gregory: Add a description of this character.
• Napoleon Hill
• Robert Schuller
• Larry King
• Tony Robbins
• Rick Warren

Quotes edit see section history

• “p. 38 -What about the heroic battles between immune cells and cancer cells that patient are encouraged to visualize? <… T>here is no consistent evidence that the immune system fights cancers, with the exception of those cancers caused by viruses, which may be more truly 'foreign.' People whose immune systems have been depleted by HIV or animals rendered immunodeficient are not especially susceptible to cancer, as the 'immune surveillance' theory would predict. Nor would it make much sense to treat cancer with chemotherapy, which suppress the immune system, if the latter were truly critical to fighting the disease. Furthermore, no one has found a way to cure cancer by boosting the immune system with chemical or biological agents. Yes, immune cells such as macrophages can often be found clustering at tumor sites, but not always to do anything useful.”

• “p. 41 -But rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost. First, it requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. This is a great convenience for health workers and even friends of the afflicted, who might prefer fake cheer to complaining, but it is not so easy on the afflicted. <…> One 2004 study even found, in complete contradiction to the tenets of positive thinking, that women who perceive more benefits from their cancer 'tend to face a poorer quality of life - including worse mental functioning - compared with women who do not perceive benefits from their diagnoses.* (*M. Dittman, 'Benefit-Finding Doesn't Always Mean Improved Lives for Breast Cancer Patients," APAOnline, Feb 2004.)”

• “p.68 - As one life coach has written: 'We are Creators of the Universe…. With quantum physics, science is leaving behind the notion that human beings are powerless victims and moving toward an understanding that we are fully empowered creators of our lives and of our world.' In the words of Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, this is so much 'quantum flapdoodle.'”

• “p. 76- While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion - always 'in the loop,' always available for a conference call, always ready to go 'the extra mile.' In academia, where you might expect people to have more control over their workload hour by hour, the notion of overwork as virtue reaches almost religious dimensions. Professors boast of being 'crazed' by their multiple responsibilities; summer break offers no vacation, only an opportunity for frantic research and writing. I once visited a successful academic couple in their Cape Cod summer home, where they proudly showed me how their living room had been divided into his-and-her work spaces. Deviations from their routine - work, lunch, work, afternoon run - provoked serious unease, as if they sensed that it would be all too easy to collapse into complete and sinful indolence.”

• “p.96- Still, surely it is better to obsess about one's chances of success than about the likelihood of hell and damnation, to search one's inner self for strengths rather than sins. The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? From the mid-twentieth century on, there was an all too practical answer: more and more people were employed in occupations that seemed to require positive thinking and all the work of self-improvement and maintenance that went into it. Norman Vincent Peale grasped this as well as anyone: The work of Americans, and especially of its ever-growing white-collar proletariat, is in no small part work that is performed on the self i”

• “p. 126- Osteen's books are easy to read, too easy - like wallowing in marshmallows. There is no argument, no narrative arc, just one anecdote following another, starring Osteen and his family members, various biblical figures, and a host of people identified by first name only. A criticism directed a Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s applies just as well to Osteen's oeuvre: 'The chapters of his books could easily be transposed from the beginning to the middle, or from the end to the beginning, or from one book to another. The paragraphs could be shuffled and rearranged in any order.'* (*William Lee Miller, "Some Negative Thinking about Norman Vincent Peale," originally published in "Reporter," Jan 13 1955. http://george.loper.org/trends/2005/Aug/955.html)”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.

  Highlighted by 61 Kindle customers

• positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is part of our ideology—the way we explain the world and think we ought to function within it.

  Highlighted by 57 Kindle customers

• The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

  Highlighted by 54 Kindle customers

• The alternative to both is to try to get outside of ourselves and see things “as they are,” or as uncolored as possible by our own feelings and fantasies, to understand that the world is full of both danger and opportunity—the chance of great happiness as well as the certainty of death.

  Highlighted by 53 Kindle customers

• There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

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• Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things “as they are,” or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.

  Highlighted by 51 Kindle customers

• This is optimism, and it is not the same as hope. Hope is an emotion, a yearning, the experience of which is not entirely within our control. Optimism is a cognitive stance, a conscious expectation, which presumably anyone can develop through practice.

  Highlighted by 46 Kindle customers

• Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

  Highlighted by 40 Kindle customers

• In the hands of employers, positive thinking has been transformed into something its nineteenth-century proponents probably never imagined—not an exhortation to get up and get going but a means of social control in the workplace, a goad to perform at ever-higher levels.

  Highlighted by 39 Kindle customers

• The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts. Positive thinking may be a quintessentially American activity, associated in our minds with both individual and national success, but it is driven by a terrible insecurity.

  Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• America
• New York
• Victoria
• Iraq
• United States

First Sentence edit see section history

Errata edit see section history

p. 163 - "it led Seligman to comment to the New York Times that 'it's important that optimism not be footless <probably meaning 'footloose' <sic>> and unwarranted.'"
Seligman is actually using the word footless correctly, according to its secondary dictionary definition: "Lacking a firm support or basis; unsubstantial."

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Barbara Ehrenreich (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 155.232

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Anthropology › Cultural
• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Sociology
• Books › Health, Mind & Body › Psychology & Counseling › Movements

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history