Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Clearly, I'm in the minority on this one. But this book just didn't work for me at all. It seems like such a promising concept, too - "based on the NPR series of the same name, 80 essayists - from the famous to the previously unknown - complete the thought that begins the book's title". But the result is - despite being a bestseller - a dreadful book. If I had checked it out in a bookstore, rather than buying it here on Amazon, I might have figured it out from the back cover. Here are the four 'quotes from inside' that the publishers use as a teaser: "I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it." Jackie Robinson. "I believe in empathy." Azar Nafisi. "I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit." Andrew Sullivan. "Be cool to the pizza delivery dude; it's good luck". Sarah Adams. Well, yes. Am I supposed to argue with any of these noble sentiments? Hardly (though I might suggest a different justification for being cool to the pizza delivery dude than trying to generate future good karma). But it's precisely the completely unobjectionable, generally safe nature of the assorted beliefs expressed in the book that make it - and I may burn in hell for this - a major YAWN. If you crack open the book and can wade through some of the most mind-numbingly pompous prose imaginable, there are further nuggets to be gleaned: Benjamin Carson believes that "there is no job more important than parenting". William F. Buckley believes in God, but, being WFB, finds it necessary to express himself thusly: "This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature". Jackie Lantry believes in the power of love to transform and heal. Again, I'm not questioning the validity of these beliefs (what would give me the right?), but they end up being expressed in most cases with a kind of cliched banality that is available free in any Hallmark store. More charitably, in considering why this book ended up being such a disastrous collection of woolly-minded writing, almost never rising above hackneyed cliches and Reader's Digest level banality, I believe that the problem lies in the formulation of the question. It seems that asking people to come on the radio for three minutes to sum up the core beliefs of their lives is a poor mechanism to generate anything of interest. It's a trap, causing most respondents to founder in banal generalities. The (very) few interesting contributors were smart enough to avoid the lure of the pompously abstract profundity, and rooted their answers in the specific. Here are the opening sentences of the three most interesting (OK, let's be honest, the only three truly interesting) essays: 'I consider myself a feminist, and I feel like a moron admitting it, but it's true: I believe in Barbie.' 'I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.' 'There is no such thing as too much barbecue'. Let me be clear again - this review is in no way a critique of the expressed beliefs and opinions of the contributors. It is concerned only with the interest level and readability of their efforts. On those criteria, this book has to be considered a dreadful, soporific, failure.