Beautifully written, and one of those books that works on the broad "what's it all about?" level and the cool little stories level.

At first I thought this book was going to be an examination of hedonism but I was pleasantly surprised at how engaged I was reading this

2nd read:
Paul Bloom is one of my favorite authors, and this is one of the first books that I read by him, so I wanted to give it another read. This book is phenomenal and as usual, it blends philosophy, science, and psychology to make the reader think and question what we think we know about human nature. What I really love about this book is that Bloom picks different things that give us pleasure, presents theories from various people or conventional wisdom, and then he asks questions and points out how these theories don’t explain different aspects of pleasure. Bloom was the first one to introduce me to essentialism and so much more with this book. This book is more than worth the read, and I’ll most likely read it again in the coming years.

1st read:
Excellent book on essentialism for us all to have a better understanding of why we like what we like it. This book answered a lot of questions I’ve had for ages

(review based on the first ~30% of the book, I abandoned this book and am not going to complete it)

The topic of this book is interesting, so I was hopeful starting out. Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that this is a book that evangelizes the authors one theory at any cost, including making completely unsourced claims that look extremely dubious even to a casual observer.

This book can be summarized with "we like things because we're born essentialists" and that's just not enough meat for an entire book.

The author also seems blissfully unaware about several of the groups he nevertheless write about; for example:

I used to work with children with autism and was constantly reminded to call them “children with autism” instead of “autistics”—the argument being that there is more to these people than their disorder.

He's either unaware, or doesn't bother mentioning how many people on the spectrum feel about that.

But where he really lost me was with his treatment of gender.

Before ever learning about physiology, genetics, evolutionary theory, or any other science, children think that there is something internal and invisible that distinguishes boys from girls.

Seven-year-olds tend to endorse statements such as “Boys have different things in their innards than girls” and “Because God made them that way” (a biological essence and a spiritual essence). Only later in development do children accept cultural explanations, such as “Because it is the way we have been brought up.” You need to be socialized to think about socialization.

Let me get that straight: he thinks that we're born gender-essentialists, and the evidence he use in favour of that is that 7 year old people who know little about evolutionary theory, still think that gender is a fundamental property of people, and he (or so it seems) thinks that socialization is something that hasn't yet started by age 7, so the views of 7-year old children can be used as evidence that a certain view is NOT a result of socialization? (where does he imagine 7 year old got the idea that human beings are the way we are "because God made them that way" ?)

A pretty understandable oompilation of the science on why we like what we like.

All-in-all an okay read. Not my favorite of his. I found his overall argument kind of lost throughout the book. He begins by saying "I'm making an argument for essentialism." And then at the end of the book brings it back up again. I found the connection to essentialism throughout the book to be lacking. He needed to point out to the reader when he was making his argument to make it more clear. It's a good, enjoyable read, though. It takes you through the science of human pleasure across the spectrum, to show how psychologists try to explain why we like what we like.

Read if you like: popular nonfiction, psychology, trying to understand weird things like cannibalism and masochism.

Informative and entertaining. It's basically about the theory of essentialism, and how it applies to different fields of life. Bloom references lots of interesting research, and his style is just delightful.