Discover Well-Read Black Girl Books and the projects reshaping publishing →

Book Summary and Reviews of The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

The Art of Choosing

by Sheena Iyengar

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2010, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go?

Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Sheena Iyengar's award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences. Use The Art of Choosing as your companion and guide for the many challenges ahead.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. [A] delightful, astonishing take on the pitfalls of making up one's mind." - Publishers Weekly

"A lucid work of popular science written by an accomplished practitioner." - Kirkus Reviews

"No one asks better questions, or comes up with more intriguing answers." - Malcolm Gladwell

"Sheena Iyengar's work on choice and how our minds deal with it has been groundbreaking, repeatedly surprising, and enormously important. She is someone we need to listen to." - Atul Gawande, author of Better and Complications

This information about The Art of Choosing was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Randy Burgess

Another pseudo-psychology book
Iyengar offers nothing more than a survey of other people's work on various aspects of social cognition & culture related to a very broad definition indeed of "choice." There is nothing new here, and although Iyengar is a sedulous writer, she is not an effective one: her attempt fits in with the trend in the past decade to pack a popular science book full of anecdotes and factoids, then pretend that this amounts to something more than a heap.

The surprising thing is, Iyengar has supposedly done her own research on choice. Why, then, didn't she build her book around that research? Far better, for those who are interested in this topic, are books built with a real theme, e.g. "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less," by Barry Schwartz. Schwartz actually has something to say, and he says it in fewer pages than Iyengar takes to say nothing.

lol

nothing new.
Dull read, lost interest after 2 pages. Tends to drag. Very amateurish.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar's groundbreaking research on choice has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Security Education Program. She holds degrees from UPenn, The Wharton School of Business, and Stanford University. She is a professor at Columbia University, and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award. Her work is regularly cited in periodicals as diverse as Fortune and Time magazines, the NYT and the WSJ, in books such as Blink and The Paradox of Choice.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Art of Choosing, try these:

  • Enlightenment jacket

    Enlightenment

    by Sarah Perry

    Published 2025

    About this book

    A dazzling new work of literary fiction from the author of The Essex Serpent, a story of love and astronomy told over the course of twenty years through the lives of two improbable best friends.

  • Disobedient jacket

    Disobedient

    by Elizabeth Fremantle

    Published 2023

    About this book

    A riveting novel based on the life of Artemisia Gentileschi—the greatest female painter of the Renaissance—as she forges her own destiny in a world dominated by the will of men.

  • The Great Passion jacket

    The Great Passion

    by James Runcie

    Published 2023

    About this book

    From acclaimed bestselling author James Runcie, a meditation on grief and music, told through the story of Bach's writing of the St. Matthew Passion.

We have 4 read-alikes for The Art of Choosing, but non-members are limited to three results. Join free to see the complete list of recommendations.
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

More Science, Health and the Environment

Browse all Science, Health and the Environment books

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
When No One Else Will
by Amanda Skenandore
1940s Chicago nurse risks everything at an illegal women’s clinic during a high-profile trial of courage and sisterhood.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket
    Look What You Made Me Do
    by John Lanchester
    A propulsive tale of intergenerational tension and revenge from the Booker Prize nominee.
  • Book Jacket
    The Jellyfish Problem
    by Tessa Yang
    A marine biologist rescues a Maine island menaced by a giant glowing jellyfish in this inventive debut.
  • Book Jacket
    Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
    by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
    Son of Weather Underground radicals recounts life on the run and decades of revolutionary struggle.
Who Said...

The most successful people are those who are good at plan B

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Book
Trivia
  • Book Trivia

    Can you name the title?

    Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

Q S, S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.