IF YOU can get past the maddeningly misleading title, there is plenty to feed on in this book. It is not really about pleasure, more about the science of emotion and human cognition and all that goes along with that: decision-making, language, dreaming, intelligence, love, reason, memory, learning, mental illness and so on. Pleasure and the avoidance of pain feature along the way, but 鈥榮 declaration in the preface that they are central to an understanding of emotion does not really play out in his text.
The fact that he ends each chapter with a happiness lesson 鈥� for example, 鈥渘egative thoughts are just thoughts, not reality鈥� 鈥� rather gives the game away: this is a very decent book about emotions and behaviour masquerading, in a market flooded with similar fare, as something rather different. But don鈥檛 let that stop you reading it.
Oxford University Press