As Kent Greenfield (The Failure of Corporate Law) notes near the beginning of The Myth of Choice, American culture has put an increasingly high value on the importance of choice in nearly every arena of modern living. You can "have it your way" at Burger King, while perusing options for health insurance on your customized smartphone, which also offers the ability to watch thousands of movies via Netflix, or choose from your entire lifetime's collection of songs saved in Google Music--and so on.
Readers interested in the means and methods of how we make decisions--and how we perceive ourselves as immune to attempts at influencing those decisions--will find Greenfield's book an embarrassment of riches. Applications of the idea of choice vary widely, from a consideration of the question--not the answer, but the question--of whether sexual orientation is a choice, to the ramifications of laws around whether or not motorcyclists have a choice about wearing helmets. How much choice do we grant our children, knowing that too much autonomy can lead to situations where the child has to relinquish that autonomy and doesn't, while also knowing that not enough autonomy can lead to too much dependence, to an underdeveloped sense of a child's strengths and weaknesses? How are habits choices, and how are they not? Greenfield pulls from sociology, law, popular culture, history and reason, with essays that strike a perfect balance of erudition and down-to-earth consideration of responsibility. --Matthew Tiffany, counselor, writer for Condalmo