This briefs on human suffering adds to human understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, this chapters show how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering.
From the book reviews:
"Anderson's work provides a wake-up call to those in quality of life research domains as well as a broader audience too - essentially anyone concerned with the plight of the human lot. ... This book began with an ambitious goal of providing ways of thinking through the difficult and multi-dimensional issue of suffering experienced by humankind ... ." (Rhonda Phillips, Applied Research Quality Life, Vol. 9, 2014)
"Anderson's work provides a wake-up call to those in quality of life research domains as well as a broader audience too - essentially anyone concerned with the plight of the human lot. ... This book began with an ambitious goal of providing ways of thinking through the difficult and multi-dimensional issue of suffering experienced by humankind ... ." (Rhonda Phillips, Applied Research Quality Life, Vol. 9, 2014)