Not Always Sunny, But Pleasantly Skeptical

(October 14, 2009)  Barbara Ehrenreich wants to make clear that she is not a spoilsport. “No one can call me a sourpuss,” she declared. “I have a big foot in the joy camp.”

She is the author of “Dancing in the Streets,” a history of “collective joy,” she notes, and a lot of fun at parties. So her new book, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” should not be mistaken for a curmudgeonly rant. It is serious social history. By contrast, this newest volume is based on her stay in a world that she became intimately familiar with: the smiley-faced, pink-ribboned, positive-thinking culture that surrounds breast cancer patients.

“There were exhortations to be positive,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. The unrelenting message was “that you had to be cheerful and accepting and that you would not recover unless you were,” said Ms. Ehrenreich, who also writes frequently for The New York Times. Most infuriating, she added, was the advice to “consider your cancer a gift.”

Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral psychology at Columbia, is a more recent member of the Negatives. He has written at length about the absence of scientific evidence showing links between prayer and healing in his book “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance Between Religion and Medicine.”   

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