David Brooks (1) (1961–)

I liked this a lot better than I thought I would. Self help type books have never been and probably never will be "my thing," but I thought that Brooks struck a pretty good balance between practical advice, examples, and data. That being said, I often found his tone kind of grating. It wasn't quite condescending but maybe over-confident on certain points. I'm not sure of the best way to describe it.

There were a lot of times where I felt like Brooks made certain actions sound way easier than they actually are. A lot of what he had to say about being empathetic by using your body language and facial expressions to convey your attentiveness felt so vague to me. He would often describe good, empathetic listeners as using their eyes to convey certain emotions, and I found myself just wondering... how? I worry about my own facial expressions a lot and often find that they don't convey what I want them to and don't know how to fix it. It always feels basically out of my control. I strongly preferred the more direct advice about how to ask better questions and think about people as both individuals and as a part of cultural groups, etc. Although, even that advice often came across as kind of.. unnatural? A lot of his examples sounded more like therapy-talk than actual casual conversations. He did address that though and I know that it's more about what you're asking than how.

He also contradicted himself a lot, which kind of makes sense because people do tend to be very contradictory, but at the same time I don't really think the enneagram is THAT different from MBTI types. He'll talk about not wanting to generalize about people and focus on who individual people are, but then he'll describe people as *being* specific traits on how you can *be* a specific kind of person. I'm not talking about when he talks about how people's backgrounds are important. That's different and I did like that chapter, but I think it's a little odd to say people are complicated and then say overall this person was blank or these people seem to be blank. I don't think I'm explaining it well, but I guess I don't see people as *being* anything and I didn't think he did either. I was more interested in the description of people like collections of stories or surfers going from one wave to the next, always changing and in that sense nobody is just a list of characteristics. It's about the story of their lives and how they came to be where they are now and what they will do later. Brooks seems to agree with all this, but he also goes against this in the way he describes people...

I do think that you can know other people to a certain extent and we should always be trying to know the people around us better because we will never know anybody (including ourselves) as well as we think we do. I think that sometimes Brooks is a little bit too confident about how well he (or others) know people. I think that knowing a person isn't a boolean value. It's a journey/story of its own. It's like... an action. To know a person is something ongoing and it definitely involves a lot of what he discusses, but I think Brooks could maybe think about the language he uses more carefully because sometimes he speaks about it as this finite thing even though I think he would agree that it's not.

I think this book is a kind of good entry point into thinking about these concepts on your own, but as a book I think it is also kind of weak. I think it could have been a bit shorter and more compact and I wonder how Brooks would write this book differently in a few years or what he would change about it now.… (more)

David Brooks doesn't profess to always follow the road to character, but he wanted to know what it looked like. Thus, his motivation for studying people throughout history who made an effort to build their character and follow a moral code of conduct that wouldn't change based on circumstance, their desires, or the fashion of the day.

The book starts with an eloquent introduction. Brooks outlines his thesis that humans have an internal struggle between "Adam 1" (the purest, moral self) and "Adam 2"(a more hedonistic, selfish self/ as long as you're not doing anything obviously bad, you're doing just fine). He also describes a current culture that has made it harder to be "good". Listening to the audio version of this book I found myself furiously scribbling notes, wanting to capture everything in the introduction as it seemed so relevant.

Each of the people Brooks highlights in his book as examples of taking the road to character are flawed, as we all are (at one point while listening my husband turned to me and said "Is this a book about people with good character or bad character?!") This is where the book really loses momentum. Instead of being inspired by their stories, I really found the book to just drag through most of these profiles. They really could have benefited from some significant editing.

The final chapter of the book provides a nice closing, weaving together the themes from the profiles. Along with the introduction, this is where Brooks shines.… (more)