Kate's Reviews > The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us from Despair

I grabbed this on a whim when it was on my libro.fm feed because I was intrigued. To be fair, this is right up my alley, as I recently finished my phd program where I spent the last few years studying well-being and writing a dissertation on it.

I was intrigued by the idea of well-being from a political and economic viewpoint (both how it impacts well-being and vice versa), and the sense of hope/agency impacting well-being. This is a completely different lens with which to view well-being than anything I had ever looked at previously. The studies in the book were really fascinating and eye-opening (and also explains why the past few years have felt, frankly, like a giant sh!tshow when everything has piled on).

This book does feel like it could be a three-manuscript dissertation. It is basically a combination of scholarly articles that belong in a journal repurposed into a book format, so it is much more academic than pop culture inspo style. If you're looking for a casual commentary with some quotes to pull for Instagram captions, this ain't it.

I listened to most of this in a car during rush hour, so I already would like to listen to it again to revisit and really sit with the content a bit more.

One thing, though, is that one of the chapters in particular does get a little stats-heavy....not in a hard to understand way, as I don't think it's overly advanced, but it doesn't translate well to the audiobook format. Listening to someone read the equivalent to a paper's "results" sections (i.e., p-values and the results of paired t-tests or whatever test it was) was a little tedious. I think this book is probably one that may be better to read in written format because it's hard to really process statistical analysis without seeing it.

But, overall a very interesting read that definitely explains a lot and does provide some great food for thought and context for how to make things suck a little less for folks moving forward.

Thanks libro.fm and Princeton University Press for the free audiobook.