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A review by cocoonofbooks
The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama XIV
4.0
3.5 stars. It's a bit misleading to have the Dalai Lama listed as the primary author of this book; it was actually written by a psychologist (Dr. Howard C. Cutler) but includes extensive quotes from the Dalai Lama based on the author's series of interviews with him and a set of public talks the Dalai Lama gave in Arizona in the 1990s. I found what the Dalai Lama had to say to be very interesting and valuable (lots of highlighting going on!), but I found the larger structure of the book somewhat annoying, with too much or too little personal input from the author at certain points.
The general concept of the book is tying the Dalai Lama's ideas to Western psychological studies to show their empirical value. In many ways, this works well, but I often found Cutler's summaries of the scientific research to be overly simplistic, plus the research is almost two decades old and some aspects have received much more study since then. Cutler's own attempts to put the Dalai Lama's advice into practice are scattershot, and the one-off examples are counterintuitive to the fact that we hear repeatedly how even small change can take a long time.
Leaving aside my issues with the larger structure of the book, as a vehicle for sharing the Dalai Lama's thoughts, I enjoyed it immensely. His thoughts are relatively basic and straightforward, but he returns again and again to the idea that you have to consciously make an effort to change your mindset -- to cultivate compassion, to replace negative emotions and thoughts with positive ones, to be grateful for your difficulties -- and he clearly has seen results from his intentional, continued meditations in these areas. Although some of what he says may appear simplistic at times, coupling it with this idea of the necessity of practice made me continually admit, "I don't know for sure that this doesn't work, since I haven't devoted any serious time and effort to trying it." And it gave me the motivation to want to put that effort into cultivating happiness.
I recommend the book, for the Dalai Lama's wisdom if not the hit-or-miss structure and commentary surrounding it.
Edited to add: The Kindle version I had was a complete mess. It looked like it was just an OCR version of the print copy that nobody proofread afterwards. It may just be the 10th anniversary version of the book that is this way.
The general concept of the book is tying the Dalai Lama's ideas to Western psychological studies to show their empirical value. In many ways, this works well, but I often found Cutler's summaries of the scientific research to be overly simplistic, plus the research is almost two decades old and some aspects have received much more study since then. Cutler's own attempts to put the Dalai Lama's advice into practice are scattershot, and the one-off examples are counterintuitive to the fact that we hear repeatedly how even small change can take a long time.
Leaving aside my issues with the larger structure of the book, as a vehicle for sharing the Dalai Lama's thoughts, I enjoyed it immensely. His thoughts are relatively basic and straightforward, but he returns again and again to the idea that you have to consciously make an effort to change your mindset -- to cultivate compassion, to replace negative emotions and thoughts with positive ones, to be grateful for your difficulties -- and he clearly has seen results from his intentional, continued meditations in these areas. Although some of what he says may appear simplistic at times, coupling it with this idea of the necessity of practice made me continually admit, "I don't know for sure that this doesn't work, since I haven't devoted any serious time and effort to trying it." And it gave me the motivation to want to put that effort into cultivating happiness.
I recommend the book, for the Dalai Lama's wisdom if not the hit-or-miss structure and commentary surrounding it.
Edited to add: The Kindle version I had was a complete mess. It looked like it was just an OCR version of the print copy that nobody proofread afterwards. It may just be the 10th anniversary version of the book that is this way.