David Brooks

From the influential and hugely popular "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author of "Bobos in Paradise" comes a landmark exploration of how human beings and communities succeed.

A Story of How Success Happens

The Social Animal

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain's work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Matthew Royal

David Brooks has always impressed me with his comments on the PBS show "Shields and Brooks," but I think this book is an intellectual mis-step. 

Brooks creates a fictional couple into whose thoughts and motives he wields god-like insight. Everything they think and feel is perfectly explained through the theses of the past two decades' Business and Pop-Behaviorist best-sellers. It’s a frame that highlights that we’re not as rational as we think we are — there are lots of factors — psychological, biological, and sociological — that influence our behavior in predictable ways. When we are aware of these tendencies, we can make better decisions. The attempt to present realistic interpersonal dynamics don’t ring entirely true, as stories where a man writing the inner thoughts of a woman rarely can. This, however, is a narrative frame for his thesis and a sort of self-referential “proof.”

About halfway through the book, he leverages his constructed credential of "insightful observer of human nature" to attack rationalism; that it is reductive and thus necessarily misses emergent system properties. Brooks makes a case for sources of knowledge outside of rationalism, with proof by anecdote of people “knowing” things without having reasons for them. He constructs a straw man of rationalism, claiming that requiring evidence and analysis is “extremism” that is responsible for pogroms and other countless negatives in the modern world.

There are gaping holes in his supporting historical narrative, such as ignoring the 1500 year European Christian era between the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance, when Reason failed to take root in the culture. He ignores any possible negative outcome from religion, while zeroing in on the ones he attributes to “scientism,” a paper tiger indistinguishable from rationalism, and using that as justification for rejecting rationality as the sole judge of truth. His strong sense of dichotomies come off as sophomorically as a highschooler asserting you can either like art OR science, or that Classical music speaks to your mind while rock and roll appeals only to the flesh.

There are definitely some brain systems and social systems that store, preserve, and recall useful information -- discovered via rational science -- but there are also quite a few biases and assumptions that people have that are deleterious, and only cured with reason. Brooks bases his spirituality on this idea that irrational sources of information are valid, and that you can’t evaluate them with rational methods. 

I understand what he’s trying to do here — break down your trust in rational thought, because people aren’t as rational as they think, and accept that irrational information is equal or perhaps superior in some cases — but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what rationality is. It’s not a viewpoint or a philosophy; it’s a tool for determining whether our irrationally-sourced ideas could be True. No one has ever made the case that humans are naturally rational. It’s a tool we sometimes struggle to use *because* of our irrational natures. 

David Brooks shouldn’t protect his faith by fleeing into irrationality; the fact that he goes this route make me think he believes his faith cannot be defended rationally.

Nelson Zagalo

David Brooks writes about the social life of humans, the implications and dependencies we've in life based in our cravings for the social. To do that Brooks uses an interesting approach describing all the scientific information disguised as the story of a couple. Thus we start with them in the book and we follow their lifes, highs and downs, from the perspective of the most recent findings in the social domain. Easy and quick to read. 

Blog review (in portuguese): http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

Kelsi Proulx

This book could have been really interesting. When I picked it up and read the description I got excited because it sounded like a wonderful engaging way to learn about humanity. However, the author tends to jump from topic to topic and through major moments in the characters lives without any real transition. There is also much more attention given to Erica and I wanted to know more about Harold. I didn't get much of a sense of the love between the two of them yet it ends with this huge dramatic scene where Harold expostulates about the love they shared...overall I hoped for more.

Gabe Cortez

Morgan Holland

From the influential New York Times columnist and best-selling author of Bobos in Paradise comes a landmark exploration of how human beings and communities succeed. Reprint. A #1 best-seller.

The Social Animal A Story of How Success Happens

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