We like  “Life Is Good” cheerfulness. But sometimes America is too Pollyannaish, says author Barbara Ehrenreich.

Here is a review by the Post-Dispatch’s David Sheets of Ehrenreich’s new book.

“Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America”
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Published by Metropolitan Books,
240 pages, $23

By David Sheets/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Americans think they live in a happy place. Turns out, that’s not the case.

We smile at adversity and disaster, prop up our psyches with amorphous adages and pep talks, and pump millions of dollars into self-help programs that better serve the providers than their audiences.

And what do we have to show for all of this? Not much. Polls suggest Americans are not pleased with their jobs, their environment, their lives. A recent survey of our overall well-being by the Happy Planet Index put the United States at No. 150 - down there with Third World countries mired in poverty and despair.

So why do we act happy when we’re not? We’re encouraged to believe positive thinking is limitless, says author Barbara Ehrenreich, when in fact it isn’t, as she makes clear with the title of her new book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.”

“Happiness is not … guaranteed even to those who are affluent, successful and well-loved,” the former Time magazine and New York Times columnist writes. “But that happiness is not the inevitable outcome of happy circumstances does not mean we can find it by journeying inward to revise our thoughts and feelings.”

Yet we try, very hard, to do so. As Ehrenreich explains, America has co-opted the good feeling born in the mid-19th century to blunt the dreary effects of Calvinism that dominated the times. Starting with Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement, and extended by Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale and later even Oprah Winfrey, the notion that all we needed was to think our way to happiness has pervaded society, so that now positive thinking has started nudging aside rational behavior and logic in our politics and our economy.

The result, Ehrenreich says, is an excess of optimism that colors our judgment and foments self-delusion about reality - a delusion she cites as the reason Washington misjudged Iraq’s response to the U.S. invasion of that country, and the reason behind the unjustified confidence by banks and ensurers so that they defied the wisdom of their numbers and plunged the nation into a mortgage crisis.

It doesn’t stop there. Ehrenreich believes this deluded thinking has extended to our health care system, becoming apparent when she battled cancer and physicians insisted on administering heavy doses of optimism in lieu of actual treatment.

Positive thinking has value and a place in our lives; that much we all know. But Ehrenreich points out that too much of it, like too much of anything else, can have just the opposite affect.