The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B004R0MU98 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and best-selling 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 30 years than we had in the previous 3,000.
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.
Direct download links available for Download The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 16 hours and 9 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: March 8, 2011
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004R0MU98
In this book, New York Times columnist David Brooks takes on the audacious endeavor of weaving together a unified picture of the human mind through various discoveries from the sciences. Oh ya, and it's all presented in the context of a story about two fictional characters, Harold and Erica.
You can get a good feel for the topics he covers from the chapter titles:
1 - Decision Making
2 - The Map Meld
3 - Mindsight
4 - Mapmaking
5 - Attachment
6 - Learning
7 - Norms
8 - Self-Control
9 - Culture
10 - Intelligence
11 - Choice Architecture
12 - Freedom and Commitment
13 - Limerence
14 - The Grand Narrative
15 - Metis
16 - The Insurgency
17 - Getting Older
18 - Morality
19 - The Leader
20 - The Soft Side
21 - The Other Education
22 - Meaning
If you think that's a lot of chapters, you're right on target. It's a pretty thick book at 450 pages, but it's easy to move through (not quite novel easy, but much more so than typical nonfiction).
Book's strengths:
- If you are familiar with Brook's social commentary (and like it) you won't be disappointed, but this isn't the real strength of this book.
- In a style that's reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell, Brooks offers a pop view of experimental psychology that is downright fascinating. The studies he explores are the real meat and merit of this book, and they expose many fallacies in the way we think that we think. Here are a few of the topics:
* The hidden role emotions play in making decisions.
* How mirror neurons in the brain are wired to mimic the person we're talking to.
I don't share his politics but I like David Brooks on THE NEWS HOUR for his thoughtfulness and decency, and in his columns for his well-articulated ideas and remarkable way with words. I read a preview of this book in THE NEW YORKER and felt my interest piqued. Parts were quite amusing, and the thesis that we are far more ruled by the unconscious than the rational mind sounded like something I'd like to read. Disappointingly, the book has not lived up to my expectations, though it has some wonderful writing and fascinating ideas here and there.
The major problems for me were that the hypothetical, stereotyped characters grew tiresome and even offensive over time and that not enough that was new or weighty materialized. The book combines the fictional stories of protagonists Harold and Erica with lots of recycled information from various neuro-scientific, psychological, and other studies that scores of popular writers have already mined. The reasoning here seems circular in that Brooks invents this implausible pair to illustrate his idea that noncognitive skills like "character" and "street smarts" lead to happiness and fulfillment, then cherry-picks studies to support his made-up characters and preconceived view.
Tracking Harold and Erica's imaginary life stories ("the happiest story you've ever read"), the book purports to explain what makes for the most successful infancy, schooling, young adulthood, love, career, culture, self control, morality, freedom, commitment, and more. The reach is so broad and the evidence that directly supports it so scant that I never entirely trusted Brooks' conclusions. Further, the use of allegorical characters for hundreds of pages to illustrate his contructs failed to move or engage me in the way an actual novel or real life story might.
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