A review by sillyduckie
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David

Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.
Overly simplistic and not very original. It reads like an annotated review of books and experiments the author has found interesting, supplemented by violent anecdotes.

The author was raised in apartheid South Africa which she brushes off. Her anecdotes about South Africa, thus far, are largely not hers and are violent rapes. I'm not sure why a psychologist would so carelessly publish anecdotes about her friends' rapes and sum it up as a "we all go through hard things". She also casually mentions police brutality in the case of an officer who was so focused on catching a suspect he ran past a colleague being violently assaulted and didn't notice.

Some of the experiments she talks about seem unnecessarily cruel such as the professor who marks all his students' essays as the worst essay he's ever read, telling them that the essays were marked by other students, in order to access their thoughts and feelings on the matter.


I've listened to an hour and a half of this book. I don't think I will get anything out of finishing it, other than more reasons to think that the world is a terrible place and everything is pointless.
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