Oprah Daily - Charley Burlock
"This is one that every one of us—and recent graduates especially—needs to hear. In just 67 pages, New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik holds a mirror up to our achievement-obsessed world, bent on monetizing every hobby and accelerating every career move, and opens a door to a brighter future: one with accomplishment at its center . . . his overall argument is both humble and motivating. And the book is slim enough to fit in even the most cramped hatchback on move-out day!"
Chicago Tribune - John Warner
"All That Happiness Is becomes a kind of call to respect the necessity and benefits of experiencing that sense of accomplishment and how once that happens, the work necessary to garner achievements comes more naturally . . . It took me maybe 20 minutes to read All That Happiness Is, not much of an achievement, but the full worth of a book isn’t in how long we took to read it, but in how long it lingers in our lives. In this case, Gopnik has accomplished much."
Kirkus Reviews
2024-02-14
The longtime New Yorker writer waxes philosophical in this slim, aphoristic book.
Gopnik, author of The Real Work, offers an extended essay on a positive and pleasing emotion. When he was 12, the author started to play guitar, and he recalls how happy he was when he first learned how to create “the ringing beauty of the G chord.” “The sense of happiness I felt that week remains resonant,” he writes. Next, Gopnik discusses the young Scottish poet Don Paterson’s obsession with Japanese origami. “Genuine happiness,” he writes, “is always rooted in absorption in something outside us, and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.” He argues that accomplishment counts for far more than the “tyranny” of achievement because “it’s more compelling than the concreteness, the trophy pressed in your hands.” Furthermore, “learning to work hard is as important as learning to work well.” Gopnik loves to cook at home, and chopping onions is “my entry to happiness.” For French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, playing a violin wasn’t just a hobby; it was a “parallel passion, and it fed the already fully achieved virtuosic technical level of his primary art.” Thinking back on his guitar practicing, Gopnik writes, “accomplishment is bounded by the eternal truths of repetition and habituation and exhaustion and renewal.” He posits a “pluralism of pleasures” that extends deeply into our imaginations and practices, and he is a big believer in open societies because they provide more space for accomplishment. Some of the other things that bring the author happiness are the music of the Beatles; walking and biking in Central Park, admiring the work of “one of my personal heroes,” Frederick Law Olmsted; and, of course, the act of writing.
Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.
