A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives-from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain
A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives-from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain
If you are going to care for someone, you must first understand them. If you're going to hire, marry, or befriend someone, you have to be able to see them. If you are going to work closely with someone, you have to be able to make them feel recognized and valued. As David Brooks observes, "The older I get, the more I come to the certainty that there is one skill at the center of any healthy family, company, classroom, community or nation- the ability to see each other, to know other people, to make them feel valued, heard and understood."
And yet we humans don't do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us to do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us. If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person's story should you pay attention to?
Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience, and from the worlds of theatre, history, and education, to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate towards others; it helps readers find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.
The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is a profoundly creative act- How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, seeking to understand and yearning to be understood.
Industry Reviews
Praise for the works of David Brooks
The Second Mountain
"Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive."-The Washington Post
The Road to Character
"David Brooks's gift-as he might put it in his swift, engaging way-is for making obscure but potent social studies research accessible and even startling."-The New York Times Book Review
"A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin."-The Guardian
"Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts."-USA Today
The Social Animal
"Provocative and fascinating . . . seeks to do nothing less than revolutionize our notions about how we function and conduct our lives."-The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Brooks's considerable achievement comes in his ability to elevate the unseen aspects of private experience into a vigorous and challenging conversation about what we all share."-San Francisco Chronicle
