The Social Animal by David Brooks

The book’s subtitle—The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement—conveys its ambition. It is a mixture of physics, economics, behavioral psychology, spirituality, world experience, and common sense. Brooks has a wise tone, and a readable writing style, which he applies to this book. He seeks to make sense of people and behavior on a number of different levels--what makes people successful, what makes people rich, and what makes people happy. As you might have guessed, there is not a lot of overlap between the groups.
His thesis is this : who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. Everything we do in life—the careers we choose, the way we experience and perceive the sensation of being alive—emerges from an infinitely complex neuronal network sending out signals that, largely unknown to us, assess and determine our behavior. Insights, information, responses to stimuli are governed by our emotions, a rich repository of thoughts and feelings that courses just beneath the surface of our conscious minds. He has been working on this book, by his own accoutn, for over three years and it shows. He has absorbed and synthesized a tremendous amount of scholarship. He has mastered the literature on childhood development, sociology, and neuro-science; the classics of modern sociology; the major philosophers from the Greeks to the French philosophes; the economists from Adam Smith to Robert Schiller. He quotes artfully from Coleridge and Stendhal. And there’s nothing showy about it.
Many reviews I read quibbled with the way he presented the concrete examples of the points he makes--the imaginary people leading imaginary lives--but I found it to be an interesting way to operationalize the theories he espouses, to be able to visualize how this might play out. His fictional people were believable to me and helped me to picute what he was getting at. Really interesting piece of work.