The Social Animal
The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
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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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 8, 2011 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307739032
- File size: 465366 KB
- Duration: 16:09:30
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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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. Arthur Morey expertly delivers Brooks's complex blend of historical and scientific fact, opinion, and philosophy, which are imbedded in a fictional backdrop. Morey's pacing is impeccable as the narrative flows over greatly varying terrain--from the quotes of towering scientific thinkers to the interpersonal angst of a boy and girl falling in love. All of Brooks's wry wit is captured in Morey's clean narrative style. The listener can almost hear the familiar voice of the author, a frequent television pundit, in Morey's pitch-perfect delivery. Essential listening for those who seek to understand what makes us human. M.C. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine -
January 31, 2011
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.
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