James' World 2

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Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).

At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one, but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found?

It is not an easy volume to place. You’d assume that it belongs on the self-help table. Yet the title suggests home improvement or even civil engineering, and so ardently does Brooks insist on the “four big happiness pillars”—family, friendship, work, and faith—that readers of a nervous disposition may choose to wear a hard hat. On the other hand, Brooks is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, so he would slot into the business section with ease. Given that, as he says, “the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose,” there’s an equally strong case for the cookery shelf. Or how about philosophy? Anyone who cites Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Mick Jagger, Epicurus, and Epictetus, as Brooks does, would be totally stoked to hang out in such lofty company. No one, of course, is loftier than his co-author, and, if your bookstore is furnished with an Oprah wing, that is where the book must be displayed

When two writers join forces, it can be tricky to sort out who did what. Not in this case. Brooks is the principal player, and Oprah is his guest star. Only four times does she enter the action to offer “A Note from Oprah,” and the four notes, added together, take up less than fourteen pages in a book that is more than two hundred and forty pages long. What does she bring, then, apart from the humongous commercial clout of her blessing? Well, she reveals that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was “always at heart a classroom. I was curious about so many things, from the intricacies of the digestive system to the meaning of life.” (Had she been French, of course, those two items would have been the same.) Near the start of the book, ever alert to her audience, she scrunches what she considers Brooks’s most valuable lesson into “words you should tape to your refrigerator,” and, for extra clarity, accelerates into italics: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” One more scrunch, and Oprah has the mantra she wants: “Feel the feel, then take the wheel.”

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