The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness
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The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness
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Narrated by:
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Paula Poundstone
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Written by:
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Paula Poundstone
About this listen
Is there a secret to happiness? Beloved comedian Paula Poundstone conducts a series of "thoroughly unscientific" experiments to find out, offering herself up as a guinea pig and recording her data for the benefit of all humankind. Armed with her unique brand of self-deprecating wit and the scientific method, in each chapter Paula tries out a different get-happy hypothesis. She gets in shape with tae kwon do. She drives fast behind the wheel of a Lamborghini. She communes with nature while camping with her daughter. Swing dancing? Meditation? Volunteering? Does any of it bring her happiness? And, more important, can the happiness last when she returns to the daily demands of her chaotic life? The results are irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and pointedly relevant to our times.
The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness is both a hilarious story of jumping into new experiences with both feet and a surprisingly poignant tale of a working mother raising three kids. Paula is a master of her craft. Her comedic brilliance, served up in abundance in this book, has been compared to that of George Carlin, Tina Fey, Lily Tomlin, and David Sedaris.
©2017 Paula Poundstone (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksWhat the critics say
What listeners say about The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Blythe
- 2018-04-14
Not as funny as you'd expect
I often struggle with what to rate a book that I liked but did not love, and although Audible says 3 stars is "Pretty good" it feels like a low number. But 3.5 isn't an option, and I am not to the "it's great" point of four stars. It was an entertaining listen. Paula Poundstone can be funny. I always enjoy hearing her on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and I have actually attended one of her live shows also. But in this book, and in the live show, I found her not as entertaining as she is in the small amounts at a time on NPR.
In this book, she decides to use herself as a guinea pig and try putting herself through various experiments, trying out things that are supposed to make you happy. These range from getting fit to getting organized to meditation to fast sports cars to going hiking, swing dancing, and charity work. And more! In each chapter she describes the plan, what she did, and what the result was, interspersed with various anecdotes and descriptions of her life. The amount of fun she poked at her kids in a published book made me cringe - did they give permission for this to be published about them, and at 12 years old, are they really capable of making that judgement? She also seems weirdly paranoid about keeping her son away from computers, to the point of sending him to a summer camp for months to keep him completely offline, and sending him to school in another state because it's one of the only ones she could find that does not use computers. While there is undoubtedly valid reason to limit screen time and to be aware of the effects that mobile devices have on concentration span, in this day and age she is definitely not doing her son any favours by raising him to be computer illiterate. Exactly what kind of job does she think he's going to get?
Much of the book was amusing, with occasional moments of outright funny. Many of her concerns - for example with the quality of the US education system - are entirely valid. Overall though I ended up feeling slightly uneasy about the environment she lives in and apparently raised three kids in. I'm glad that in the process of writing this book she found some things that do increase her happiness; I hope they help. The book was an entertaining listen on Audible (read by the author herself) but I do not think I would want to listen again.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 2019-12-04
I freaking loved it
thanks for writing it and thanks for reading it too me too.
you kill me.
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