Rating: 
Summary: One of my favorites!
Review: I wish more researchers would write books like this one. Seligman has managed to escape the obfuscations of technical writing as well as the syrupy simplifications of the self-help genre. He presents his empirical findings in a way that does not require an advance statistics degree, and he bases his conclusions on these findings in a way that enables the reader to evaluate his claims. This book is accessible to the thoughtful general reader, but it is not necessarily a quick or easy read. There will be times when the reader must simply plow through the pages. Is this effort worth the trouble? While Seligman's prose may not carry you through the book, his ideas will - helplessness, pessimism, optimism, the links between thinking and feeling - these ideas are quite likely to become a central part of your life. In psychology classes, counselors are cautioned to avoid the imposition of personal values on their clients. While I see the merit in this warning, Seligman presents a clear empirical basis for advocacy of optimism over pessimism. This may not be absolute truth, but it is close. I believe there is something in this book for everyone. Parents need to apply these principles in raising children. Organizations should apply these principles to release the talents of their employees. Individuals will find the tools they need to take charge of their self-defeating attitudes. Read this book with anticipation - it will give you the tools to change your own life.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprising and Convincing
Review: The thing that consistently surprised me about this book was the way that the author was able to provide extensive scientific verification for his claims. Most "self-help" books have anecdotal evidence at best to support their hypotheses. This book solidly supports its conclusions by means of numerous formal studies. Moreover, some of the material is very counter-intuitive. Attitudes one would have assumed were optimistic turn out to be pessimistic, and vice-versa. Seligman shows repeatedly where actual, testable predictions have been made based on his notions of optimism/pessimism, and the predictions have turned out to be well-founded. This requires careful, systematic definitions of terms, which he provides. Equally interesting was Seligman's analysis of the consequenses of optimism and pessimism, and his demonstration that optimism can be learned, with beneficial results that extend well beyond "feeling good." I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: ***** for self-help, 0* for scholarship
Review: This book starts by demonstrating that animals can learned to be helpless. Seligman then goes on to examine the explanation styles that people have and how these beliefs affect the way they behave. Generally speaking the first part of the book, which is dedicated to the differences in explanatory styles is quite interesting. The section also contains a couple of self-test to measure your own level of optimism and your level of depression. I should say in passing that it is somewhat regrettable that the portion that shows readers how to change their explanatory styles is at the back of the book rather than immediately following the test results. I say that because chronic pessimist/depressive people like myself (I scored abysmally on both test) might be tempted to give up and kill themselves before they find out that the author actually tries to help them feel better. The portion at the back (learn how to be an optimism) constists of simple but undeniably effective tricks to change your way of thinking. All is consistent with "mood therapy" "cognitive psychology" types of similar works. While there is no question that Seligman in on to something with his theory on optimism, he tries to use it to death by applying to just about everything including politics, society and history. Through history, there has been no shortage of philosophers who attempted to use one basic principle to explain society. Be it weather (Montesquieu), atoms (atomist Greek philosophy) or the evolution, it generally turn out to produce simplistic and poor scholarship. That kind of explanation also hides (although rather poorly) a deep sense of ethnocentrism. If Seligman seriously think that one can explain voters' choices on the sole base of the optimistic/pessimistic profile of the candidates, I hope for him he is smoking good crack. What is more worrysome is his complete lack of understanding of basic concepts such as society, ideology and culture. For instance, one chapter is a comparison of East and West German media. Not only does it leave out important questions (such as how are the media produced and how closely do they reflect the readers' view)but what about ideology. Well of course, you'd expect a communist regime to give less weighting to individual agency in their explanation of events. Duh! At any rate the chapter explains nothing since his theories would have us expect that more optimistic group perform better which is not the case. Personnally, I would have preferred a much shorter self-help book devoid of Seligman's naive positivist supertheories. It is a shame because in the end, his book could have raised good questions.
After reading the introduction on how explanatory styles influence people's lives I thought "How interesting? What is the relationship between learned helplessness and poverty? What is the role of ideology and social institutions in reproducing social inequalities through teaching people to be helpful or helpless, etc."
But instead, Seligman was more interesting in whoring himself out by helping a life insurance company determine which job applicants are best suited? Guess what? I could not care less.
Rating:
Summary: FASCINATING PAGE TURNER
Review: I'am 16 I recommended this to teens espically goths and Pessimists .It has scientfic evidence that shows the benefits of the sunny side(like we opptmists have said all along.)In health wealth happiness and relations!If there's one Phsycholgy book you read in your whole life make it this one!
Rating:
Summary: Unlearn Pessimism
Review: Martin E.P. Selligman has written a ground breking book on how to unlearn pessimism and Learn Optimism.This excellent book blends hard-edged science with practical advice that really works. Learned Optimism gives us an understanding of how we hold ourselves back and how we can change for the better..I wholeheartily recommend this book for everyone who wants to learn how to change their mind and their life and is genuinely interested in in helping and understanding their fellow human beings.
Rating:
Summary: A classic
Review: Unlike many of the positive thinking books that attempt to woo the reader into believing that optimism is the answer to life's ills, this well-researched book explains optimism and pessimism, how they originate and their pros and cons. It is an excellent book and should be read by all who want to understand these issues. I recommend two books in addition to this marvellous book. The first is Optimal Thinking: How To Be Your Best Self, a practical how-to book to show you how to resolve your emotions and make the most of every situation. The second book is Serious Creativity which shows you how to generate options, particularly when you are stuck.
Rating:
Summary: Optimism is the facilitator of eomotional intelligence
Review: I'm a coach and use the priniciples of this book repeatedly in my coaching practice with great results for the client. Optimism is the facilitator of all the EQ competencies, and EQ often matters more for job and life success than IQ. Dr. Seligman is not only the guru of optimism, having studied it for over 25 years, he also admits to having been a pessimist himself, so he would be in a position to tell someone else that it can be learned, and how one can learn it. Which he does! I have seen clients learn it; a good tempered optimism, used appropriately for the lifeskills tool that it is. Most compelling are his reasons for why one would want to learn it. If you knew it would increase your health, your lifespan, your chances of fulfilling your potential, and your enjoyment of life, wouldn't you give it a try? All self-help books end where they end. Coaching is good for putting this sort of thing into practice and mastering it. It's a social and emotional skill and needs to be practiced under those circumstances, with guidance and support. Read the book and understand the theory and then set about learning to master this competency. Do you need to be right or do you need to enjoy your life? "Pessimists are more often right, but optimists accomplish more." Besides, who wants to be around a pessimist?
Rating:
Summary: A compelling guide towards a more positive outlook on life.
Review: I am a psychologist who read this book in order to facilitate my work with clients. Dr. Seligman presents a pursuasive review of his research into the effects of learned optimism on mood, performance, health, etc. His three dimensions of thinking--pervasiveness, permanence, and personalness--provide the reader with a concrete, easily understandible description of their cognitive processes, thus facilitating both monitoring and changing these processes. Because his research spans several diverse areas including health, sales success, sports, politics, his methods are beleivable to even the most die-hard psychological skeptic. I highly recommended this book for both professionals and any one else interested in changing their life for the better through making simple alterations in their ways of thinking
Rating: 
Summary: More of a "why..." than a "how to..." book.
Review: This was a fairly interesting read. Seligman spends 80% of the book discussing what he has discovered about learned optimism over the years, and what other researchers have found on the subject. All of this information helps build an strong case for the idea that we humans can, and should, learn to be more optimistic. That being said, I gave this book such a low rating because I feel that the title is completely misleading. I didn't want to read all sorts of information about WHY changing my mind and life is important and possible. I wanted to learn HOW, and that's what the title promises. To be sure, there are some suggestions of how to learn optimism, but such little space in the book is dedicated to this topic that I felt misled and "ripped off" by the title. It's like reading a book called "Instructions for Knitting a Sweater for your Baby" and discovering that only the last chapter is in fact instructive; the first 100 pages are about the history of knitting, the need for babies to wear sweaters, what happens to those poor babies who don't wear sweaters, and why the author considers himself to be the best darn knitter in the entire county. Enough already!
Rating:
Summary: A psychology book. Some interesting ideas.
Review: This was more of a psychology book rather than a self-help book. There were more contents on ¡§What is the problem ?¡¨ instead of ¡§How to tackle the problem ?¡¨ It contained a lot of description of experiments, making the book looked like the author¡¦s personal research history. Some contents were repetitive, e.g. the casual relationship between pessimism and depression. The reading was not light, although not hard to understand either. Having said that, the contents showed the author was an expert in the optimism area with plenty of experience and research. He was objective. For example, the author recognized pessimism has its values, the idea of ¡§flexible optimism¡¨ is at most a tool only. The book includes a section for parents to guide their children. There were some interesting concepts or ideas:
¡P Why depression is so serious nowadays ?
¡P Argued the difference between optimism and pessimism does matter.
¡P The three aspects of optimism and pessimism differences.
¡P Positive idea: optimism can be learnt.
¡P ¡§Maximal self¡¨ theory. How the meaning of life is reduced.
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