Ebook The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks

Ebook The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks

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The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks

Ebook The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks

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Amazon.com Review

Guest Reviewer: Walter Isaacson on The Social Animal Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter. David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? How do we instill imaginative thinking? How do we develop our moral intuitions and wisdom and character? Brooks has always been a keen observer of the way we live. Now he takes us one layer down, to why we live that way. --Walter Isaacson An Amazon Interview with David Brooks We talked with David Brooks about, among other things, Jonathan Franzen, Freud, and Brooks's own unfamiliar emotions, just before the publication of The Social Animal. You can read the full interview on Omnivoracious, the Amazon books blog, including this exchange: Amazon.com: Speaking of Tolstoy, I bet a lot of people are going to quoting the first line of Anna Karenina to you: "Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Is there a consistency between what makes a family happy, the way that this family turns out to be? Brooks: You know, I never bought Tolstoy's line. Amazon.com: I didn't either. Brooks: I didn't know many happy families that were alike. One of the things you learn is that we're all so much more complex. We all contain multitudes, so someone who might be a bully in one circumstance is incredibly compassionate in other circumstances. We have multiple selves, and the idea that we can have a very simple view of who we are, what our character is, that's actually not right. One of the things all this research shows you is how humble you have to be in the face of the complexity of human nature. We've got a 100 billion neurons in the brain, and it's just phenomenally complicated. You take a little child who says, "I'm a tiger," and pretends to be a tiger. Well that act of imagination--conflating this thing "I" with this thing "tiger"--is phenomenally complicated. No computer could ever do that, but it's happening below the level of awareness. It seems so easy to us. And so one of the things these people learn is they contain these hidden strengths, but at the same time they have to be consciously aware of how modest they can be in understanding themselves and proceed on that basis. A Letter from Author David Brooks © Josh Haner, The New York Times Several years ago I did some reporting on why so many kids drop out of high school, despite all rational incentives. That took me quickly to studies of early childhood and research on brain formation. Once I started poking around that realm, I found that people who study the mind are giving us an entirely new perspective on who we are and what it takes to flourish. We’re used to a certain story of success, one that emphasizes getting good grades, getting the right job skills and making the right decisions. But these scientists were peering into the innermost mind and shedding light on the process one level down, in the realm of emotions, intuitions, perceptions, genetic dispositions and unconscious longings. I’ve spent several years with their work now, and it’s changed my perspective on everything. In this book, I try to take their various findings and weave them together into one story. This is not a science book. I don’t answer how the brain does things. I try to answer what it all means. I try to explain how these findings about the deepest recesses of our minds should change the way we see ourselves, raise our kids, conduct business, teach, manage our relationships and practice politics. This story is based on scientific research, but it is really about emotion, character, virtue and love. We’re not rational animals, or laboring animals; we’re social animals. We emerge out of relationships and live to bond with each other and connect to larger ideas.

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From Publishers Weekly

New York Times columnist Brooks (Bobos in Paradise) raids Malcolm Gladwell's pop psychology turf in a wobbly treatise on brain science, human nature, and public policy. Essentially a satirical novel interleaved with disquisitions on mirror neurons and behavioral economics, the narrative chronicles the life cycle of a fictional couple—Harold, a historian working at a think tank, and Erica, a Chinese-Chicana cable-TV executive—as a case study of the nonrational roots of social behaviors, from mating and shopping to voting. Their story lets Brooks mock the affluent and trendy while advancing soft neoconservative themes: that genetically ingrained emotions and biases trump reason; that social problems require cultural remedies (charter schools, not welfare payments); that the class divide is about intelligence, deportment, and taste, not money or power. Brooks is an engaging guide to the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, but what he shows us amounts mainly to restating platitudes. (Women like men with money, we learn, while men like women with breasts.) His attempt to inflate recent research on neural mechanisms into a grand worldview yields little except buzz concepts—"society is a layering of networks"—no more persuasive than the rationalist dogmas he derides. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Product details

Hardcover: 448 pages

Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (March 8, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 140006760X

ISBN-13: 978-1400067602

Product Dimensions:

6.4 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.2 out of 5 stars

509 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#104,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

The Social Animal by David Brooks, a Kindle book I began reading on July 28th when my mom and I were flying home from a trip to New York. So engrossing, I barely noticed the turbulence.This book is very much written in the style of a BBC documentary having to do with the human body, ala "Here we see Jane waking up in the morning and bumbling to her bathroom to take a shower; little does she know, but millions of cells and nerves have been awake and busy all while she's been asleep," then the camera focuses in on her arm or face where a graphic or animation of internal activity takes place, demonstrating action at a cellular level. This book does the same with a cast of four characters who fall in love, marry, have children and those children then grow up, all while the narrator of the book interprets these activities, choices, and traits as sociological decisions which can go one way or another or a myriad of different ways.I loved this book and was riveted by its simple yet easily empathic writing style. It seemed like the best kind of reference book, one that you find yourself happily quoting often. Super ultra thumbs up!

The first quarter of this book was fascinating. I could barely put it down. David Brooks offers explanations for many phenomena that we see in the society around us and quotes studies to back up his ideas. Even in the beginning of the book, I suspected he was probably cherry picking studies that support him or subjectively interpreting study results to get the results he wanted, but that's somewhat OK in this situation. This is not a scientific work. It's a journalist putting forth his opinion. In any event, it was interesting reading and got me thinking. Then, closer to the middle of the book, it began bogging down. The use of fictitious characters to illustrate his points began to grow old. The book began to drag. 10,000 words were used to say something that could have been said in 1,000. Then his agenda became more pronounced. He made statements that were not supported by any facts or studies. For instance, he states that a new upper class is emerging in America. He claims that hard working, competent individuals are replacing the inherited money, providing no evidence for this. In fact, this is not the case. Numerous studies (such as the 2010 report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development) indicate that in the U.S. social mobility is much lower than in most other western, developed nations. Canada, Australia and most of western Europe have more social mobility than us. In the U.S. the greatest predictor of one's social class and wealth is the class/wealth of one's parents. The notable European exceptions are the UK and Italy, which have even lower social mobility than us. Clearly, Mr. Brooks wants to believe the US is wonderful at rewarding merit and competence regardless of social background, even when the facts do not necessarily support this conclusion. He does this with other points as well, making generalizations without any supporting evidence.To sum up, I agree with some of his conclusions and disagree with some. The book could have said as much in fewer pages. His method of telling the story gets old and really becomes irritating after a while. As the book drags on, he makes more unsupported statements of opinion and more broad generalizations. A bit disappointing.

Brooks writes as if his "characters" experienced the development of each aspect in today's world. Life doesn't work that way; people are shaped by the social climate of their time. Not all of his references are to primary sources, and we are usually not told how significant findings are (or if they are at all significant). On one occasion, for example, he references Time magazine. Nor are we told whether findings have been replicated. That aside, he's a competent writer and the book reads well.

I had to buy this book for class as it was required reading, but it is not just a boring textbook or nonfiction book. David Brooks writing makes the information about society's role in a person's life easy to read and digestible. He includes many facts and research about how people's outcomes can be determined in life and the chances of success, why some succeed and others plateau. Yet, it is written in a story way most of the time, following a few main characters on how they meet, get married, have a son, and how their decisions affect their overall outcome in life. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in psychology and nonfiction books that are relevant to our lives. It was a good read. The book is paperback and came in time for class.

I particularly enjoyed Brooks’ customary and careful craftsmanship, never over-arguing a point. At times I wondered about his digressions into psychology and behavioral science, as I take it he’s not an authority in either field. Nevertheless, he seems to have had good advisors, and none of it seemed to be controversial or out of place. Most of all, his moderate and even-handed understanding of humanity was comforting and accessible, and perhaps closest to any truth that we can ever know.

I stopped reading after 60 pages. What I was hoping was to learn “how a wise general can train and listen to the scouts”, i.e., encourage positive behaviors through reshaping/relearning. From what I read, I found it difficult to develop interest in the characters in the author’s narrative. Instead, I found I was skipping to the research/theories.It would be helpful if Amazon provided a bit of the book to know what to expect before buying.

Purely generic self-help bullsh*t. Where is all of the "research" he keeps alluding to? Don't waste any time or money on this nonsense.

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