Search -
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
The Social Animal The Hidden Sources of Love Character and Achievement Author:David Brooks 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. In this ambitious departure, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a captivating, colorful tale grounded in everyday life. This is the story o... more »f how success happens to one fictional American couple, Harold and Erica -- how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. It's a story that illustrates a radically 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 have in the last three thousand. But we have not glimpsed the complete picture -- the parts connected -- until now. 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.
Brooks takes us 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 illuminates 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 you see yourself and the world.« less