Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness (Elizabeth Farrelly, UNSW Press, $29.95 pb, ISBN 9780868408378, October) ***

In this book, Elizabeth Farrelly refers to the many notorious excesses of our society as ‘blubber’. It’s not just accessories like the plasma TV and the SUV that she writes about, but also the aesthetics of our surroundings: buildings, people and art. Like many writers before her, Farrelly attributes these excesses to our ongoing pursuit of happiness, but she goes further than that, encompassing everything from politics to beauty. The book is filled with ideas, and its observations are often thought-provoking, but it lacks direction. The prophetic conclusion seems disconnected from the content of the book, and leaves the reader a little unsure of what Farrelly is trying to achieve. There is the sense that she is trying to include everything she knows in this one book. She has attempted to make what seems to have started as an academic thesis more accessible with the use of popular culture references—but quotes from Mick Jagger and the Dreamworks movie Over the Hedge neither give the book substance, nor complement the scholarly content. The attempt to make a book of ideas appeal to a mainstream audience evokes comparisons to Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell, but the book doesn’t quite reach its lofty aspirations.

Tony O’Loughlin is a bookseller at the Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, Melbourne

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker