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theangrylawngnome's review
3.0
This is the sort of book that is very close to torture for a nitwit like me to review. How on earth am I supposed to sort out the elements I thought brilliant, from the elements I thought interesting, but not applicable on the scale she seemed to assume, from the elements that smelled like scholarly cherry-picking from the stuff that made me want to vomit, but also kinda/sorta elicited a chuckle of recognition? I'm afraid I simply don't have the intellectual horsepower to write the review I'd like, nor when you boil it down, the energy. But ah gotta say sumthin'.
So, fuck. I'll just have to admit that bits of her book aren't the only emetic lurking around here. Doubtless if I have the courage to return to re-read this review somewhere down the line, I'll add the entire thing to the yark category. And phooey. But at least this sliver of self-knowledge is going to give me license to keep things much shorter than they would have been otherwise.
So: In general, the good stuff was all in the front, and it was all downhill from there. Perhaps not declining at the same rate from chapter to chapter, but a decline across the board, and rather relentlessly. Or such was my sense.
She did an excellent job of unmasking the hypocrisy of our age, in the sense that we seem to have this inherent sense of superiority -- largely unjustified -- over the mores and customs of previous ages. Drugs, booze, fashion, food, she clobbered that shibboleth from angles I'd never even considered, and made more sense doing so than anything I believe I've ever read in similar vein.
Yet, at some point there was a things turned into a kind of prurient -- and far too long -- bizarro-world describing the "spa" phenomenon of the 19th century. Oddities of diet, weird belief systems, etc. The main problem here, of course, is that anyone with two brain-cells to rub together would have to admit that however weird they were (and they were!) we've actually managed to out-weird them in the present day: put Scientology, est, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, and so on up against any of the other folks and they don't look so strange (well, maybe excepting the hand-job bit.) And that doesn't even mention the way the whole Rapture-bug has perverted whole Protestant denominations.
AND: Show me one era since early modern times that hasn't had some gang of kooks running around conning the gullible. I think it was Umberto Eco who noted that the first thing the followers of the so-called Enlightenment did was start playing with Tarot cards and drawing up each others astrological charts. So, rather oddly, she spent a considerable portion of the book discussing an area where there may not in fact be all that much hypocrisy in our time: Our kooks are just about as weird as the kooks of previous generations.
Scholarly cherry-picking: She seemed to be speaking of the Greek festivals and later the Christian pre-lenten carnivals as some sort of natural outflowing you'd expect to find among oppressed or at any rate second class citizens. But that idea just doesn't hold water historically from where I'm sitting. Unless there was some festival in one of the dynastic periods of China where Mandarins dressed as monkeys, or at any time in the Muslim world where such and such a cleric had a fool elected as his opposite. (There is that oogie Shi'a thing with the forehead slicing, but I can't imagine the group slice 'em ups are conducive to anyone's overall happiness.) Or ancient Egypt, or in the Aztec empire, or amongst the Mongol hordes and so on. Seems to me the oppressed and/or second class stayed that way, and damn straight never got out of line with satire.
And, lastly: Why, that last chapter, of course. "The Triumph of Experience" my left nut. More like "Goddess of Happiness Jennifer Michael Hecht Delivers Unto You Unworthies Her Checklists -- And if you Blaspheme, You're gonna be one Unhappy Camper." Okay, a bit long for a chapter title, but certainly far, far more accurate a description.
The one size fits all nature of the lists irked me, and the tone of what seemed unbridled arrogant omniscience pissed me off. If you're on the Autistic Specrum (as I am), if you've got ADHD (as I do, unfortunately the less common ADHD-PI type) and if you possibly suffer from Prosopagnosia (as I may, the jury's still out on that one, unfortunately) most of what is on those lists is either beyond me or strikes me as being close to hell on earth. Either that or I'll never have a good day, never experience euphoria and not have a good life. (All of which may not be too far off the mark, though I'd have to give that matter a bit more thought. Guess Hecht would advise me to blow my brains out, I suppose, if those lists are truly beyond me. And then I could spend the afterlife doing the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" thing, a la Revelation.)
Note: I think I covered everything, I'm sure a reader can separate my brilliant, irrelevant, vomit-inducing, etc categories without further clarification...except for the bit that made me laugh. And did so in spite of myself. Damned if Hecht didn't sound exactly like my late aunt, who passed away in July. And I gotta admit she was something else. Heck, three months before her passing she spent a month in Uganda, helping at an orphanage. And this at age 75. 'Course barring the nudity stuff and probably the drugs. She was a Sister of Saint Joseph, after all. And if she'd been male probably would've been the first American pope.
So, fuck. I'll just have to admit that bits of her book aren't the only emetic lurking around here. Doubtless if I have the courage to return to re-read this review somewhere down the line, I'll add the entire thing to the yark category. And phooey. But at least this sliver of self-knowledge is going to give me license to keep things much shorter than they would have been otherwise.
So: In general, the good stuff was all in the front, and it was all downhill from there. Perhaps not declining at the same rate from chapter to chapter, but a decline across the board, and rather relentlessly. Or such was my sense.
She did an excellent job of unmasking the hypocrisy of our age, in the sense that we seem to have this inherent sense of superiority -- largely unjustified -- over the mores and customs of previous ages. Drugs, booze, fashion, food, she clobbered that shibboleth from angles I'd never even considered, and made more sense doing so than anything I believe I've ever read in similar vein.
Yet, at some point there was a things turned into a kind of prurient -- and far too long -- bizarro-world describing the "spa" phenomenon of the 19th century. Oddities of diet, weird belief systems, etc. The main problem here, of course, is that anyone with two brain-cells to rub together would have to admit that however weird they were (and they were!) we've actually managed to out-weird them in the present day: put Scientology, est, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, and so on up against any of the other folks and they don't look so strange (well, maybe excepting the hand-job bit.) And that doesn't even mention the way the whole Rapture-bug has perverted whole Protestant denominations.
AND: Show me one era since early modern times that hasn't had some gang of kooks running around conning the gullible. I think it was Umberto Eco who noted that the first thing the followers of the so-called Enlightenment did was start playing with Tarot cards and drawing up each others astrological charts. So, rather oddly, she spent a considerable portion of the book discussing an area where there may not in fact be all that much hypocrisy in our time: Our kooks are just about as weird as the kooks of previous generations.
Scholarly cherry-picking: She seemed to be speaking of the Greek festivals and later the Christian pre-lenten carnivals as some sort of natural outflowing you'd expect to find among oppressed or at any rate second class citizens. But that idea just doesn't hold water historically from where I'm sitting. Unless there was some festival in one of the dynastic periods of China where Mandarins dressed as monkeys, or at any time in the Muslim world where such and such a cleric had a fool elected as his opposite. (There is that oogie Shi'a thing with the forehead slicing, but I can't imagine the group slice 'em ups are conducive to anyone's overall happiness.) Or ancient Egypt, or in the Aztec empire, or amongst the Mongol hordes and so on. Seems to me the oppressed and/or second class stayed that way, and damn straight never got out of line with satire.
And, lastly: Why, that last chapter, of course. "The Triumph of Experience" my left nut. More like "Goddess of Happiness Jennifer Michael Hecht Delivers Unto You Unworthies Her Checklists -- And if you Blaspheme, You're gonna be one Unhappy Camper." Okay, a bit long for a chapter title, but certainly far, far more accurate a description.
The one size fits all nature of the lists irked me, and the tone of what seemed unbridled arrogant omniscience pissed me off. If you're on the Autistic Specrum (as I am), if you've got ADHD (as I do, unfortunately the less common ADHD-PI type) and if you possibly suffer from Prosopagnosia (as I may, the jury's still out on that one, unfortunately) most of what is on those lists is either beyond me or strikes me as being close to hell on earth. Either that or I'll never have a good day, never experience euphoria and not have a good life. (All of which may not be too far off the mark, though I'd have to give that matter a bit more thought. Guess Hecht would advise me to blow my brains out, I suppose, if those lists are truly beyond me. And then I could spend the afterlife doing the "wailing and gnashing of teeth" thing, a la Revelation.)
Note: I think I covered everything, I'm sure a reader can separate my brilliant, irrelevant, vomit-inducing, etc categories without further clarification...except for the bit that made me laugh. And did so in spite of myself. Damned if Hecht didn't sound exactly like my late aunt, who passed away in July. And I gotta admit she was something else. Heck, three months before her passing she spent a month in Uganda, helping at an orphanage. And this at age 75. 'Course barring the nudity stuff and probably the drugs. She was a Sister of Saint Joseph, after all. And if she'd been male probably would've been the first American pope.
ginn's review
3.0
A look at our cultural beliefs regarding happiness, putting the present in context of the past. I found it pretty enlightening, but I would have liked more examples of past behaviour.
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