Win the Audiobook of The Social Animal!

What if everything we think we know about what makes human beings tick–how we make choices, choose our mates, achieve academic success, create happy home and professional lives, contribute meaningfully to society, and live according to important values and principles–is wrong? In this mesmerizing new audiobook, David Brooks argues that this is close to being the case. In recent decades, a revolution has occurred in how we understand human nature, the mind, how we interact with our environments, and what are the seeds and conditions for human flourishing. Our conscious minds, it turns out, are mere bit players: the real things that shape us, from motivation, to the choices we make, to the content of our character, bubble up from below: from the unconscious (which has 200,000 times more “processing power” than our conscious minds) and from our environment (from parents to neighborhoods to corporate work cultures).

Brooks’s audiobook is the first to bring this wealth of new knowledge down to Earth in a work of grand synthesis and observation, offering, in a completely engaging and glistening way, a powerful new understanding of how human success happens. This is far from a dry or analytic audiobook–Brooks instead tells the story of two fascinating and representative characters, Harold (an average middle class guy) and Erica (a driven Mexican-Chinese girl from the ghetto). Following them from birth through adolescence, marriage, professional life, midlife, and old age, he shows at every stage of life the deep processes and dynamics that lead to human flourishing. The result is a terrific blend of narrative and insight, story and investigation: an audiobook that is as intellectually luminous as it is hard to put down. Finally, this is an audiobook that overturns old assumptions: there are serious, though implicit, implications here for how we build a better world. Stylistically riveting, intellectually transformative, this audio will generate debate from Main Street to Washington, and will, more importantly, change the way you think about your own life, the choices you make, and the nature of the world you inhabit. A major work by a uniquely gifted writer at the height of his powers.