Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:
Failure, as Costica Bradatan puts it in his bracing new book, is good for you, but not for the reasons you might think. “In Praise of Failure” is maddening, disturbing, exasperating, seductive — I found myself turned around at so many points that even as I was closing in on the last chapter I wasn’t quite sure where I would land at the end.
This isn’t because the writing is convoluted; Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next. But this very ease is what makes “In Praise of Failure” a wild ride. There you are, taking in what Bradatan is telling you, accepting his introductory promises of “failure-based therapy” and a “journey of self-realization,” when before you know it you are so startled out of your expectations that you have to ask, What did he just do?
It all starts out innocently enough, with Bradatan saying we need to “take failure seriously.”
more here.