I am fascinated by Arianna Huffington, primarily because she is famous solely for being Arianna Huffington. I admire her for her outspokenness and her incredible ability to continuously recreate herself (she’s a Republican! no wait, she’s a Democrat!). She is the founder of the Huffington Post, and currently has a new book out, On Becoming Fearless. I wanted to like this book, I really did. Really.

Huffington’s claim–which I agree wholeheartedly with–is that we live in a culture of fear, and that women are particularly vulnerable to fearmongering. We are constantly barraged by reminders of all the ways we are failing–at home and at work and everywhere in between. Every choice we make is met with criticism and over time, we internalize that critical voice and allow it to control our decisions. We become fearful, and this fear infects our lives. We fear that we are failing our children and our spouses and our parents. We fear that we’re not working hard enough or making enough money. We fear that we are ugly. We fear that we will not succeed, and so we don’t.

“The most common response to this crisis of self is conformity,” Huffington writes in her Introduction. “So, ironically, the woman who appears to be well adapted may be the one who simply has become the most comfortable being governed by her fears, while the ‘neurotic’ one is still gamely struggling to reach her fearlessness.” As I read this, I thought instantly of the minivan driving soccer mom, and of my resistance to that stereotype. I think, in this moment, that Huffington is right; one way of allaying fear–or at least of creating the appearance of allaying fear–is to conform to the group. Once you are part of the group, there is nothing to fear. Except, of course, that the fears don’t vanish once you’re part of the group; they just eat away at you while you drive your minivan to soccer practice. Huffington identifies the places in our lives where we are most likely to be fearful–our relationship with our bodies, for example, or with work or money or love–and offers strategies for overcoming these fears. She looks at other literature in this area and quotes interviews with friends and Huffington Post readers and cites her own personal experiences. She is confident that women can, indeed, become fearless.

I like the idea of this book quite a lot. But the book itself left me puzzled and more than a little irritated. While this is not a Mommy Wars book, it employs that same us-against-them rhetoric. Huffington is critical of women who chose to approach the world in any way that differs dramatically from the one she is advocating here. She writes about an Oscar week party at which she found herself seated next to Hugh Hefner and his entourage, “the three pneumatically endowed platinum blondes on his arm.” She describes them as “horrifying . . . . At some point, they must have been lovely. And most likely, they still would be–but we’ll never know. That level of heavy construction and demolition can never be undone.” I am not a fan of plastic surgery, but I am even less a fan of this rhetoric. What divides women, what keeps us fearful and guilt ridden and angry about our inability to advance and succeed is, often, the criticism of other women, or at least our sense–our fear, if you will–that we won’t measure up in the eyes of other women. I think Huffington has a point about the Playboy bunnies and their desire to recreate themselves as Every Man’s Fantasy, but rather than attacking these young women (and they are young, very very young), I would have preferred she deconstruct the ideal they represent.

Too often, the book devolves into Practical Advice From Arianna, which is of little if any “practical” use in my real life. In the book’s first chapter, Fearless About the Body, Huffington asserts that “we can never really be fearless until we stop judging our looks and accept them.” Agreed; her argument is dead on. But her application falls short, particularly when she advocates solutions such as “Never get up from the table feeling stuffed or guilty, but never get up without feeling satisfied” and “Get enough sleep. . . . I try to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night as often as possible.” Quite honestly, I try to sit down at the dinner table whenever possible and I will take any sleep I can get. Reading about Huffington’s lunch hour hikes with her girlfriends or her yoga practice didn’t really give me any new insight into loving my body; instead, it left me feeling like I needed to get a whole new life, one that included a yoga instructor and a house in the California foothills.

Ultimately, I found this book unsatisfying and frustrating. The myriad references to Huffington’s own life–intended, I imagine, to be enlightening and charming–were incredibly irritating. She writes about her dear friend Sherry Lansing’s gift of a session with the aesthetician Mila Moursi, and goes on to rhapsodize about how “my regular facials include microdermabrasion . . . But even the simplest home facial can cleanse and freshen up our skin and our spirits,” she adds, in what seems to be an afterthought intended to include readers who don’t have a standing appointment with a famous Hollywood aesthetician. Huffington talks about returning phone calls during a seaweed wrap and checking her Blackberry during yoga classes. I tried to imagine what the equivalent of these might be at my house, but all I could come up with was eating M&Ms in the laundry room while the kids watch Clifford. I couldn’t connect with Huffington, although I wanted to; I wanted to feel like there was some real practical take-away message, but it seemed that the message was that when you’re Arianna Huffington, you CAN stop being fearful.

I think Huffington is right: we live in a culture that barrages us with reminders of how we are failing and imbues us with fear. I think that her message–that women CAN overcome fear, that we CAN succeed, personally and professionally, that our lives will be more rewarding if we take risks and make decisions based on what we KNOW not what we fear–is crucial, particularly for young women. But I think there is not enough of that message and too much of Arianna Huffington in this book.

This review is part of BlogHer’s first virtual book tour. You can find more reviews–and get your own review copy of Arianna Huffington’s book–at BlogHer.