Rethink Happy – Review

by Doug Kisgen

Review by Barry Boy

I was given Rethink Happy – An Entrepreneur’s Journey toward Authentic Joy – in exchange for an honest review.

This story focuses on Cleveland, a fairly successful local businessman, his family and a mysterious character called Camino. Cleveland, Cleve, leads the boring middle-class life of the owner of a small manufacturing company. One suspects that his family’s lot is even worse than his. For some reason, we don’t know, Camino seeks Cleve out at a baseball game to help him get his life on track.

As soon as Camino started to speak, I knew what Rethink Happy was going to be about. Not that that was a bad thing for me, I was looking forward to it. I have always enjoyed reading about people’s personal philosophies, even though this one is quite regular Catholic Church.

However, I did find the first three-quarters of the book more palatable than the last section, where almost all pretence of wrapping the philosophy in a thin story was ditched altogether. The ending came too soon too. As far as I was concerned, the transformation of Cleveland was nowhere near complete. Rethink Happy seems like a story cut in half to provide two books, although it is not very long anyway.

I didn’t like the title from the start. Furthermore, after having read the book, it makes it seem even more like a lecture. This is its weakness, whatever you think about the philosophy of living a meaningful life expounded in it. In books like this, I am more interested in the ideas than the story anyway. However, even I thought that the storyline was too threadbare towards the end. I suspect that a lot of readers will find that even more annoying. Too much like being lectured as a child, told a parable, as if we can’t see what Kisgen’s real purpose is.

Still, I quite liked Rethink Happy very much, but I would change the title, flesh out the plot and finish the story.