America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks

✍ Scribed by Whippman, Ruth

• Book ID: 109526804
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 351 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781250071521

✦ Synopsis

After she packed up her British worldview (that everything is pretty much rubbish) and moved to America, Ruth Whippman was increasingly perplexed and baffled by the daily focus, if not obsession, on her own and other peoples' happiness: it came up among the mothers at the playground swings, with the butcher at the supermarket, with her babysitter who sang the praises of nudist happiness retreats, and even with her gynecologist. She encountered an American public that--stoked by the multi-billion dollar happiness-industrial complex to constantly ask itself, "Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it?"--was making itself crazy in its pursuit of contentment.

Now, in America the Anxious , Whippman embarks on an uproarious pilgrimage to explore the American happiness machine, tackling both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her search to discover what, if anything, actually does make us happy unveils a startlingly...