Wise, if sometimes circumlocutory ... Chopra’s summaries can sometimes feel rushed. It is hard to do justice to thinkers as thorny and disparate as the vehemently anti-Christian iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche and the Christian existentialist Paul Tillich in a book of this modest size. Still, Anxiety is a useful introduction to the work of thinkers who confront, rather than recoil from, our most fruitfully unpleasant feeling.
It is as though Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not ... Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice... is also spot-on. And his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.
Readers will appreciate Chopra’s lucid explanations and refreshing assertion that anxiety is an inherent part of being human that doesn’t necessarily need fixing, even if his occasional skepticism of psychiatric medications can take things off track.
