One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life
This is not yet another book purporting to tell you how to harness the power of positive thinking to improve your life. Instead, it’s a history of the positive-thinking movement. Beginning with German physician Franz Mesmer’s popular (but eventually discredited) theories of animal magnetism and moving through tuberculosis survivor Phineas Quimby (who realized the power to heal oneself came from the mind and not from an invisible fluid in the body) to Mary Baker Eddy (a Quimby patient who would go on to found Christian Science), Norman Vincent Peale in the mid-twentieth century, and on to contemporaries Joel Osteen, Tony Robbins, and Mehmet Oz, the author explores the way the idea of positive thinking has shifted and evolved as new hands touched it. Even those who are critical of the positive-thinking movement, or New Thought, as it’s sometimes known—that appellation was coined by Ralph Waldo Emerson—are likely to agree that this is a well-researched, thoughtful, and frequently surprising history of the subject. It’s unlikely to change skeptics’ minds, but that’s not the point anyway: the point is to educate and inform, and the author does that splendidly. --David Pitt