Living in a time where a huge number of choices present themselves, and a country where everyone likes to be or at least consult with an expert on every choice, and feeling occasionally overwhelmed by this, I appreciated the following sentence from the book 'To begin with, we have to change our attitudes toward choice, recognizing that it is not an unconditional good. The ending dips its toe into a big pool of philosophical questions.maybe she had no choice but to go there, but I find these big questions are more elegantly dealt with in fiction or straight up philosophy. Sometimes, for example, it can even be far better to have someone else make choices for you (chapter on doctors making difficult medical decisions and effect on guilt-grief). Iyengar points out in her own way that this is sometimes the case and sometimes not. In this way it felt like a timely book to read when every street corner in my town is plastered with Credit Suisse adverts proclaiming 'Erfolg ist die Summe richtige Entscheidungen' (Success is the summation of a series of correct decisions). Taken to its logical conclusion, 'the art of choosing' starts with the selection of strawberry jam over rasperry, but expands to cover the whole act of making life decisions (or not making decisions) and inevitably lands on the eternal question of when and whether to assign life's twists and turns to chance, fate, or choice. In a few instances does the book have a take-home message that was easy enough to hang on to and those bits were the most interesting to me (especially in the discussion of situations where one is presented with so many choices, for example in health care plans or retirement investments, that one gives up or procrastinates and decides not to choose at all, thereby making the worst possible choice)

Because of the sheer scope of the topic, and the sometimes contradictory conclusions that the studies showed, it was tricky as a non-psychologist to synthesize the material into a coherent outline. So much material was presented on so many aspects of choice that I felt its significance continually slipping from my grasp. Iyengar presents a rather overwhelming amount of information on her enormous and fascinating topic, mostly in the form of psychology experiments about how people choose things and make decisions both trivial and life or death.these experiments on far-flung subjects are glued together by her own analysis, antecdotes, and musings.

I had to read this non-fiction book quite slowly, over the course of a month, annoying friends and colleagues by citing Iyengar's studies as they attempted to choose items off a menu, though even this slow pace wasn't long enough to really make the information stick in my brain.

The art of choosing by sheena iyengar