A review by bluejayreads
The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care by Rina Raphael

3.5

 This is, ultimately, just another case where I am not actually the target audience for the book. I picked this up because it covers topics I'm quite interested in - the commodification of self-care that turns the concept of taking care of yourself into just one more thing to buy, the gentrification of good health, the wellness mandate (the idea that there exists a state of perfect health which everyone can achieve and that it is a moral obligation that everyone achieve it), how basic human body management things like "exercise" and "eat veggies" became the compulsive purview of mostly white upper-middle- and upper-class women. And it did have some interesting information. This is one of the few places I've seen that actually goes into the connection between "wellness" and spirituality, which I appreciated. But it tried to cover too much ground in too short a book to really go in-depth into anything. This is very much an overview. Which is not a bad thing! If this isn't a topic that you're fairly familiar with, you will likely find it as eye-opening as the people quoted on the back cover of my copy. But it's not really written for those like me who have already read a lot about the ideas. It's engaging, well-written, and clearly thoroughly researched. It just doesn't go into as much detail and depth as I hoped it would. 
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