The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011) by David Brooks
The non-fiction, pop science Malcolm Gladwell genre. It weaves peer reviewed research and striking data into some perspective-altering thesis. It’s a potent cocktail; a New York Times Bestseller List tour de force that hits multiple audiences. For business management types, its big picture insight is a natural pheromone: 200 or some odd pages just waiting to be mined and converted into some in vogue management mantra. For self-help/self-improvement seekers, it is a veiled source of therapy–not as blatant or effective as something like How to Win Friends & Influence People, but definitely not as embarrassing to be spotted with either. For the general population, it’s interesting conversation material. Something to draw upon or get an opinion on when amongst friends or on a date.
The Social Animal is sort of like a compilation of several books in the aforementioned genre. It doesn’t have that one perspective-altering theme, but instead relies on a narrative of a fictional married couple, Harold and Erica, as a canvas to cite studies and research that demonstrate how humans truly act. Taking the reader from birth to death of these fictional characters and jumping from topic to topic makes the book a bit exhaustive. Still, there are some really interesting chapters (which would probably greatly vary from reader to reader depending on where one’s interests lie).
Surprisingly, I was able to get attached to the Harold and Erica characters. They are in a sense hollow, composite beings whose lives were shaped by sterile experiments and statistically significant relations in the real world. They are mere vehicles for the author to cite psychologists like Kahneman and Tversky. They are tools. But is this really that much different from characters in literature? I don’t think it is. However mechanical it may be and regardless how pedantic the asides explaining human behavior are, journeying with these characters from childhood to old age made me care for them.
The Straining Reader 