The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

NO.1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SOCIAL ANIMAL Are you on your first or second mountain? Is life about you - or others? About success - or something deeper? 
The world tells us that we should pursue our self-interest: career wins, high status, nice things. These are the goals of our first mountain. But at some point in our lives we might find that we're not interested in what other people tell us to want. We want the things that are truly worth wanting.
This is the second mountain. 
What does it mean to look beyond yourself and find a moral cause? To forget about independence and discover dependence - to be utterly enmeshed in a web of warm relationships? What does it mean to value intimacy, devotion, responsibility and commitment above individual freedom? In The Second Mountain David Brooks explores the meaning and possibilities that scaling a second mountain offer us and the four commitments that most commonly move us there: family, vocation, philosophy and community. Inspiring, personal and full of joy, this book will help you discover why you were really put on this earth.

Self-Help

Brooks, David

Happiness

Allen Lane.

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world. From the Hardcover edition.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

Business & Money

Random House Audio |

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success—“résumé virtues”—and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. “Joy,” David Brooks writes, “is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.” Praise for The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian “Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts.”—USA Today

The Road to Character

Personal Transformation

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 As&nbsp;David Brooks observes, "There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen--to accurately know another person, to let 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 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 and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, 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 toward others, and to 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 profoundly creative: 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, and yearning to be understood.

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Relationships

Random House]

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\nAs David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”\nAnd 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 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?\nDriven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, 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 toward others, and to 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.\nThe act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: 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, and yearning to be understood.

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House Large Print)

Random House, Large Print

The new conservatives who are increasingly defining America's politics and values may or may not have the moral edge on their opponents. But this combative collection of writing from the new American revolution suggests that they are better writers. And the often funny essays collected here indicate that conservatism is as much about personality as it is about ideology.

Backward And Upward: The New Conservative Writing

Vintage

Profiles two formerly mutually exclusive groups of people--the business-driven bourgeois and the intellectually driven artistic bohemians--noting how in the last decade they have merged to create a single social ethos.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Simon&Schuster

Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo. In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today's upper class -- those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation.

Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

A fascinating study of literary hoaxes as part of a wide-ranging journey through literature, culture, and poetics, this book offers a fresh look into Australia’s Ern Malley affair. In the mid 1940s, writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart submitted a series of poems to the modernist literary magazine Angry Penguins under the fictitious name Ern Malley; Ernest” because they weren't, and mal” to play on the French word for bad.” Their aim was to demonstrate their utter disdain for modern poetry by deliberately writing bad verse, hastily concocted by lifting lines from whatever came to handa dictionary, an academic paper on mosquito breeding grounds, Shakespeareblended with self-conscious hints at meaning. In a flurry of excitement, the poems were published in a special edition proclaiming the discovery of an important new Australian voice. Uncovering some astounding evidence that challenges all accepted truths about the hoax and its origins and proves a link between Australian poetry and the French symbolist movement, this revelatory account combines the authority of an academic classic with the narrative tension of a thriller.

The Sons of Clovis: (Literary Hoaxes)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Queensland Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brooks, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brooks, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brooks, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

The Road to Character

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House Large Print)

Backward And Upward: The New Conservative Writing

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

The Sons of Clovis: (Literary Hoaxes)