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.
