Name: The Road to Character
Rating: 3.333333333333333 (24 reviews)
ISBN: 9780812993257

David Brooks

Evaluates America's transition to a culture that values self-promotion over humility, explaining the importance of an engaged inner life in personal fulfillment.

The Road to Character

Ben Radford

Brooks' ability to offer compelling social commentary infused with anecdotes from moral paragons of history drives "The Road to Character". His dichotomy of Adam I bestowed with 'resume values' and his internally focused counterpart, Adam II, who cultivates the 'eulogy virtues' is particularly memorable, if not slightly reductionist or heuristic. Regardless, his tracing of the myriad contours of moral development is a well-argued and welcome reprieve from modern society's self-aggrandizing and glorifying narrative. I saw Brooks argument as a secular parallel to many of my own beliefs that I derive from my faith.

Nathan Griffin

This book took awhile to get through as it’s more of a series of vignettes profiling various people and their lives and doesn’t necessarily have a great flow. Still think overall David Brooks does a pretty effective job of compiling an overall message, and he remains one of my favorite cultural commentators

Luca Conti

Too many stories of people I could not relate to even if the topic is really interesting

Adam

It's difficult to write a book on character without taking a strong opinion on what it takes to "have character", but I felt like this one did. This left me without as much of a takeaway as I would have hoped. The main focus is on biographies of various people, looking into how they lived. The leading thread throughout these was relatively simple: develop your own beliefs, stick to them through the hard times, don't showboat and base your life on the journey rather than the outcome.

Christian Bager Bach Houmann

Amelia C 

Ciara Kane

haifa

Caitlin Hooker

Sierra Nguyen

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success—“résumé virtues”—and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. “Joy,” David Brooks writes, “is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.” Praise for The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian “Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts.”—USA Today

Reiko Fu

Daniel Waterhouse

Gabriel Jönsson

Todd Gagne

The No. 1 New York Times bestseller on the secret to leading a good life We live in a Big Me culture: universities and businesses alike reward goal-oriented superstars and those who self-promote are most likely to thrive. But what does this say about us? David Brooks argues that our hunger for wealth and status is eroding our ability to create meaningful inner lives. To show us how to live better, he looks at people whose sense of humility was fundamental to their success. What they all understood was a simple but counterintuitive truth: in order to fulfil yourself, you must learn how to forget yourself.

The Road to Character

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