The Bright Side by Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I won’t detain you long with this one.
The writer is a science journalist who has written an information crammed book about optimism and whether it is an attitude to be cultivated as a way of making the most out of life. He, of course, concludes that it is. After all, as he tells us at the start of the book, he had to keep going when the premature death of his wife to ovarian cancer had left him broken and with a young family to raise.
He supports his argument with emerging research about the positive effects for people’s health, relationships, careers and general wellbeing. Some of this research seems to have a scientific, fairly secure basis and some seems more dubious. For example, he uses research by Philip Zimbardo an American psychologist. Yet in a previous book I reviewed, Humankind, there was a thorough discrediting of Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Project research.
Paul-Choudhury is, however, fairly clear-eyed in the way he analyses the benefits of an optimistic approach. He asserts that it has to be rooted in realism and it can be cultivated by most people. To Paul-Choudhury, a non-believer, optimism seems the only sensible approach to a chaotic universe where at any one time there are possibilities that we can take and shape as well as possibilities that can be imposed on us by others and by fate.
Mind you it takes him a long time to get to that conclusion via several intellectual tangential rambles – for example, the nature of evil and the doomsterism felt by contemporary youth as they ponder their reduced options and the existential climate change threat.
Esteemed blog reviewer, Mark Cornelius, was irritated by this haphazard approach. I agree with him and his conclusion that this book needed a firm editor. Yet, I also agree with Paul-Choudhury’s conclusion that optimism seems the only sensible way to live. However, I’m not sure that I can recommend ploughing through this book to get to this self-evident truth.