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3.39 AVERAGE
3.39 AVERAGE
This book would definitely have been 4 stars for me, except that at times it felt a little repetitive, a little bit too much “glorification of the good old days”, and perhaps a little pseudoscientific? I absolutely loved Brooks’ distinction between Adam I (resume values) and Adam II (eulogy values), and I learnt about so many fascinating people, some of whom I’d never heard of (it was very American-centric). And while I was very struck, particularly at the end, by his assessment of our social culture and what that is doing to erode moral character, I wished he’d not been so focused on such a specific type of person (though the people he wrote on were all quite different!). There was certainly a bit of a conservative bias that tinted each description and I would have liked to see a description of someone with truly noble character who was drastically different from the “good-old-days” representatives he chose. Nonetheless the book was excellent at the beginning and excellent at the end so it gets a solid 3.5/5 from me!
It is hard to describe what I disliked about the book, but suffice it to say I could not bear the slog. The preliminary article interviewing David Brooks about his research was much more enjoyable, and I gleaned more meaning from that overview than I have listening to the first half of this book.
Whether or not you agree with everything Brooks makes a point of here, this book WILL make you think.
I loved it.
I loved it.
Not a super-deep read, but provides some ideas to reflect on. The bulk of the book is arranged as mini-biographies of a number of historical figures, and how their lives reflected different aspects of character. These were hit-and-miss for me, but I very much enjoyed the segments on Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Eliot.
Parts of it do plod on, but I found a lot of good wisdom in this one.
This was solid David Brooks, and I thought it was well put together. If I could have given it 3.5 instead of 4, I would have, simply because I thought "The Social Animal" was so much better. Overall a good book and worth reading.
informative
slow-paced
Read just the George C Marshall section and it is a collection of bizarre stories (not sure if they are facts, need to verify) of his life strung together with assumptions about GCM's intentions and thoughts.
Interesting look at some historical figures representing different aspects of character which Brooks wanted to showcase. This is not so much a "how-to" book as it is a general case for valuing some traits that some may consider old-fashioned. I enjoyed reading it and also agree with Brooks that we might have swung a little too far into the Big Me camp away from the more humble Little Me.
I've always liked Brooks' columns, and his book was recommended to me as appropriate for the twenty-something. His general assertion, that our culture overemphasizes the external 'Adam I' and underemphasizes the internal 'Adam II', and that we overemphasize self-actualization and underemphasize self-mastery, is fine. (He doesn't-- as he seemed to in the first chapter-- lay that at the feet of Boomers or millennials, but rather the Greatest Generation.) What I particularly loved, however, were the ten mini-biographies of people (from Augustine to Eisenhower to George Eliot) whom I had only a cursory understanding and who had lessons for my twenty-something life.
My favorite quotes:
"In this [past method of determining life's purpose], you don't ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?"
"Being a personalist, [Dorothy] Day had a suspicion of bigness, whether it was big government or big corporations. Day even had a suspicion of big philanthropy. She was constantly urging her co-workers to "stay small": Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tensions in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. Personalism holds that we each have a deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering. The personalist brings his whole person to serve another whole person. This can only be done by means of intimate contact within small communities."
"The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process...she just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct. "
"The solution...was public-spiritedness. Today, when we use the phrase...we tend to mean someone who gathers petitions, marches and protests, and makes his voice heard for the public good. But in earlier eras it meant someone who curbed his own passions and moderated his opinions in order to achieve a larger consensus and bring together diverse people."
"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge." -George Eliot
"The person in love may think she is seeking personal happiness, but that's an illusion. She is really seeking fusion with another, and when fusion contradicts happiness, she will probably choose fusion."
"Self-control is like a muscle. If you are called upon to exercise self-control often in the course of a day, you get tired and you don't have enough strength to exercise as much self-control in the evening. But love is the opposite. The more you love, the more you can love."
"Humility relieves you of the awful stress of trying to be superior all the time. It inverts you attention and elevates the things we tend to look down on."
"Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness." -Lisa Fullam
"No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you'll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you'll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you'll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?"
My favorite quotes:
"In this [past method of determining life's purpose], you don't ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?"
"Being a personalist, [Dorothy] Day had a suspicion of bigness, whether it was big government or big corporations. Day even had a suspicion of big philanthropy. She was constantly urging her co-workers to "stay small": Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tensions in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. Personalism holds that we each have a deep personal obligation to live simply, to look after the needs of our brothers and sisters, and to share in the happiness and misery they are suffering. The personalist brings his whole person to serve another whole person. This can only be done by means of intimate contact within small communities."
"The sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process...she just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct. "
"The solution...was public-spiritedness. Today, when we use the phrase...we tend to mean someone who gathers petitions, marches and protests, and makes his voice heard for the public good. But in earlier eras it meant someone who curbed his own passions and moderated his opinions in order to achieve a larger consensus and bring together diverse people."
"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge." -George Eliot
"The person in love may think she is seeking personal happiness, but that's an illusion. She is really seeking fusion with another, and when fusion contradicts happiness, she will probably choose fusion."
"Self-control is like a muscle. If you are called upon to exercise self-control often in the course of a day, you get tired and you don't have enough strength to exercise as much self-control in the evening. But love is the opposite. The more you love, the more you can love."
"Humility relieves you of the awful stress of trying to be superior all the time. It inverts you attention and elevates the things we tend to look down on."
"Humility is a virtue of self-understanding in context, acquired by the practice of other centeredness." -Lisa Fullam
"No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. If you try to use your work to serve yourself, you'll find your ambitions and expectations will forever run ahead and you'll never be satisfied. If you try to serve the community, you'll always wonder if people appreciate you enough. But if you serve work that is intrinsically compelling and focus just on being excellent at that, you will wind up serving yourself and the community obliquely. A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion. It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us. What problem is addressed by an activity you intrinsically enjoy?"