Review: Sherwood, The Survivors Club

[truepenny]

The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life by Ben Sherwood

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


[library]
[audiobook]

There are interesting bits in this book, but most of what Sherwood ACTUALLY wants to do is to sell his audience on his self-help guru-ism (I did not listen to the last disc and a half or so, where I was being told to go take the quiz on his website to find out my "Survivor IQ.") He chooses to define "survivor" so broadly that it becomes meaningless (anyone who has gone through any kind of a crisis is a "survivor" in Sherwood's definition) and he's only interested in people who (a) survive and (b) come back with a song in their heart and a skip in their step, so to speak. He never talks about the part where survival (even in his broad sense) is something difficult and painful; his section on PTSD is actually on "post-traumatic growth."

Which, okay, yes, optimism is good and important, but this is like the Disneyland version of survival, and is going to leave an awful lot of people feeling like they must be doing it "wrong" because it doesn't look like that for them. Or feeling like if it doesn't look like that for them, it's because they're not trying hard enough.

I yelled at this book a lot.



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Comments

[rachelmanija]

I hated this book so much. I read it years ago and I still recall my hate vividly. I also remember thinking that it was really sexist, though I now don't recall why.