Hubbard
~~ Fyi, I made it about halfway before abandoning this book, so take this "review" with that in mind ~~
The emotion of awe is an interesting area to research, and the book had some cool insights into why we feel it as well as other fun psychology tidbits. The best part, though - the author's synthesis of thousands of awe-inducing experiences collected from around the world and the 8 common themes they boiled these down to, termed the "8 wonders of life" - came right at the beginning and I gradually lost interest from there. There seemed to me to be relatively frequent inconsistencies or stretches-of-the-truth in the interpretation of some of the studies' results, and other parts were just less rigorous than I'd hoped - it's definitely less so than something similar like The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Much of the book is filled with short excerpts of the thousands of stories, which can be enjoyable to read in their own right (and some indeed left me awed at times, too), but I was kind of hoping for a more theoretical treatment of the topic throughout, and this felt a little more like "feel good science" that's dumbed itself down a tad too much in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience and sacrificed its integrity in the process.
~~ Fyi, I made it about halfway before abandoning this book, so take this "review" with that in mind ~~
The emotion of awe is an interesting area to research, and the book had some cool insights into why we feel it as well as other fun psychology tidbits. The best part, though - the author's synthesis of thousands of awe-inducing experiences collected from around the world and the 8 common themes they boiled these down to, termed the "8 wonders of life" - came right at the beginning and I gradually lost interest from there. There seemed to me to be relatively frequent inconsistencies or stretches-of-the-truth in the interpretation of some of the studies' results, and other parts were just less rigorous than I'd hoped - it's definitely less so than something similar like The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. Much of the book is filled with short excerpts of the thousands of stories, which can be enjoyable to read in their own right (and some indeed left me awed at times, too), but I was kind of hoping for a more theoretical treatment of the topic throughout, and this felt a little more like "feel good science" that's dumbed itself down a tad too much in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience and sacrificed its integrity in the process.