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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
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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