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How To Know a Person

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

©2023 David Brooks (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

I liked David’s previous book... but this one is even better. His key premise is one I haven't found elsewhere: that conversational and social skills aren't just innate traits—they can be learned and improved upon... It’s more than a guide to better conversations; it’s a blueprint for a more connected and humane way of living.
5 Great Things To Read and Watch this summer
Original and useful… Brooks is a chatty, likeable guide
The TLS
A hands-on guide to making meaningful human connections
Kirkus Reviews
It really is a manual for our times - and everyone should read it
Matthew D'Ancona
He writes brilliantly… charming and enthusiastic… [Brooks] offers easily digestible advice to give the reader constructive and practical tools for genuinely listening and having better interpersonal conversations
Church Times
David Brooks's superb new book
The New European
I raced through the book, which is well-structured and engagingly written, and afterwards found myself making a greater effort in conversations. At the school gates, I swapped my formulaic how-are-yous for questions that invite a more genuine response, sometimes simply: “How’s your day been?” I became more alert to my bad habit of “topping” – when someone confides in you and you top it with a sob story of your own. I made tiny changes, things that friends would be unlikely to notice – and yet the difference was transformative
The New Statesman
How to Know A Person offers a series of well-wrought stories and punchy reflections on relationship-building
Church Times
Author David Brooks
Narrator David Brooks
Duration 7 hours and 28 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781802065176
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Emotions and emotional intelligence, Popular philosophy, Psychology: emotions, Social, group or collective psychology, Soft skills and dealing with other people
Availability AU, GB, IE

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