A review by 25benfadens
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks

Did not finish book. Stopped at 22%.

David Brooks writes like a journalist. As he makes very clear, this is not an area his is an expert in — in fact, he switches between disciplines to discuss the (very general) problem at hand without warning and demonstrated very little depth of understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps I am not the right audience, but most of the claims he made were things I already knew and took for granted, or claims that were unsupported. I don't like the taxonomy of all people into illuminators and diminishers; it isn't clear at all what we are supposed to take from this except that diminishers are bad people and illuminators are good people (or, diminshing behavior is bad and illuminating behavior is good). It's not nuanced, and after reading Pinker it doesn't seem intellectually stimulating.

Also, it is not very elegant writing. I had to reread sentences on a few occasions because I couldn't decode the referent of the pronouns. The structure of the book or any individual chapter is not made apparent. The little stories he told sometimes seemed unrelated from the point, or at best not really evidence at all. Perhaps I just don't like journalism.