The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens
How do we achieve success? Are some people more likely than others to end up in a good relationship? With a happy family life? A rewarding career? In the past 30 years we have learnt more about the human brain than in the previous 3000 - a scientific revolution has occurred. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind - the place where the majority of the brain's work gets done, where our most important life decisions are made, where character is formed and the seeds of accomplishment grow. In this book, David Brooks weaves new research into the lives of two fictional characters, Harold and Erica, following them from infancy to old age. In so doing, he approaches a new understanding of human nature. He outlines a definition of success, highlighting what economists call non-cognitive skills — those hidden qualities that can't be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment.
2.8 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
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Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Society, Politics & Philosophy |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
430 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-1907595448 |
| Publisher |
Short Books |
| |
How do we achieve success? Are some people more likely than others to end up in a good relationship? With a happy family life? A rewarding career? In the past 30 years we have learnt more about the human brain than in the previous 3000 - a scientific revolution has occurred. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind - the place where the majority of the brain's work gets done, where our most important life decisions are made, where character is formed and the seeds of accomplishment grow. In this book, David Brooks weaves new research into the lives of two fictional characters, Harold and Erica, following them from infancy to old age. In so doing, he approaches a new understanding of human nature. He outlines a definition of success, highlighting what economists call non-cognitive skills — those hidden qualities that can't be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment.
Read an extract from the book | New York Times
"The Social Animal and the science of human nature" | Madeleine Bunting | Guardian
Reviews
The Evening Standard
William Leith
"... if you'd like to read a shelf of books by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Johnson, Antonio Damasio, Paul Bloom, Daniel Goleman, Louann Brizendine, and David Buss, but don't have time, you could do a lot worse than read this. Brooks has really pushed the boat out here, and it's a great success."
26/05/2011
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The Observer
Ben Rogers
"The Social Animal is an odd beast of a book with a slightly arbitrary quality. It is never quite clear on what grounds Brooks has decided to explore the implications of some new ideas and not others … Despite such flaws, though, this is a spirited and engaging book, true in its ambition and liveliness to the spirit of Rousseau."
22/05/2011
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The Guardian
Andy Beckett
"For all its faults … this book has a sense of curiosity, a warmth, and a happy ending rare in political literature. You can see why it's selling and being talked about. But there's no great breakthrough here."
01/06/2011
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The Washington Post
Paul Bloom
"Brooks is a sharp, clear and often very funny writer … And [he] has a good eye for the cool finding … which makes for a pleasantly skimmable book. But there are costs to this abundance [of facts]. Brooks moves so fast that there is no opportunity to distinguish the established findings from the unlikely ones, and no chance to follow up on some of the more interesting claims."
25/03/2011
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The Sunday Times
John Kampfner
"Through his weaving of narrative and political and social science, he finds a deft device for making complex questions easy to read. But this is no panacea. The fact that he is embraced as a guru by policy-makers — just as the likes of Anthony Giddens, Amitai Etzioni, Robert Putnam and now Maurice Glasman have been over the past 20 years — says more about the lack of depth and breadth in our political debate than it does about the author."
15/05/2011
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The Economist
The Economist
"Fascinating … In building his argument, Mr Brooks uses as his framework the lives of two imaginary characters, Harold and Erica, whom he follows from cradle to grave. This deliberate homage to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 work, "Emile: or On Education”, is not a success. Rousseau’s book was banned and burned by angry readers. Harold and Erica are not that interesting, and they do get in the way of Mr Brooks’s otherwise intriguing argument."
03/05/2011
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The Financial Times
James Crabtree
"Brooks is especially adroit at poking fun at the foibles of America’s overachieving upper-middle classes ... The stylistic issue is that the central narrative conceit — the couple themselves — does not work ... the second drawback [is] that The Social Animal never nails its case that these insights into human motivations do lead to profound political conclusions."
08/05/2011
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The New York Times
Thomas Nagel
"Brooks is right to insist that emotional ties, social interaction and the communal transmission of norms are essential in forming individuals for a decent life, and that habit, perception and instinct form a large part of the individual character. But there is moral and intellectual laziness in his sentimental devaluation of conscious reasoning, which is what we have to rely on when our emotions or our inherited norms give unclear or poorly grounded instructions."
11/03/2011
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The Times
David Aaronovitch
"… the book explains everything and absolutely nothing. What makes the person that is you, as opposed to the person that is your brother or sister or your neighbour, is missing. Do we really pick our partners because of facial symmetry as Brooks avers, or is there something deeper at work? But what can you expect from a book supposedly about the unconscious, but whose index doesn’t even include the words hate, envy, guilt or dreams? And “murder” appears only once, on page 8. After ploughing through 400 pages of superficial scientism masquerading as wisdom, I felt that was not enough."
07/05/2011
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