Review: Delightful Little Book
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 10, 2012
I am committed to being unhappy.  I've long held that happiness is a narcotic and, like any narcotic, blunts your analytical faculty.  Then there was Christopher Hitchens, a notoriously heavy drinker, who had one of the finest minds of our time.  Beethoven was a well-known grouch, who, as his deafness deepened, grew increasingly anti-social and frequently picked quarrels; yet he was one of the greatest creative artists who ever lived.  This guide, eminently adaptable to the individual psyche and temperament, and hardly the proponent of a universal formula, contains a wealth of wonderful ideas and suggestions, not all of them new to me, but here compiled into a handy, inexpensive little philosophical package.Unhappiness can also be an addiction, and if, as I did, you find yourself resisting some of the advice in this book, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself why it's so important that you hold onto some of the behavioral tendencies this heart-warming little book is asking you to jettison.  I like the idea of the anchor, and suddenly realized I did have something in my pocket I was using as an anchor: the picture that forms my cellphone's home screen.  Granted the book caters to a certain class of person, with a certain level of existing material comfort and control over his or her environment, but I don't doubt for a second that most of the people who purchase this book will find gems in it that will, if they view the world through their spangled and colored light, set them on the path to greater contentment and emotional flexibility.