David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.
“David Brooks’s gift—as he might put it in his swift, engaging
way—is for making obscure but potent social studies research
accessible and even startling. . . . [The Road to Character is] a
hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story. . . . In
the age of the selfie, Brooks wishes to exhort us back to a
semiclassical sense of self-restraint, self-erasure, and
self-suspicion.”—Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review
“David Brooks—the New York Times columnist and PBS commentator
whose measured calm gives punditry a good name—offers the building
blocks of a meaningful life.”—Washingtonian
“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
“[Brooks] emerges as a countercultural leader. . . . The literary
achievement of The Road to Character is inseparable from the
virtues of its author. As the reader, you not only want to know
about Frances Perkins or Saint Augustine. You also want to know
what Brooks makes of Frances Perkins or Saint Augustine. The voice
of the book is calm, fair and humane. The highlight of the material
is the quality of the author’s moral and spiritual
judgments.”—Michael Gerson, The Washington Post
“A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your
skin.”—The Guardian (U.K.)
“This learned and engaging book brims with pleasures.”—Newsday
“Original and eye-opening . . . At his best, 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
“David Brooks breaks the columnist’s fourth wall. . . . There is
something affecting in the diligence with which Brooks seeks a cure
for his self-diagnosed shallowness by plumbing the depths of
others. . . . Brooks’s instinct that there is wisdom to be found in
literature that cannot be found in the pages of the latest social
science journals is well-advised, and the possibility that his book
may bring the likes of Eliot or Samuel Johnson—another literary
figure about whom he writes with engaging sympathy—to a wider
general readership is a heartening thought.”—Rebecca Mead, The New
Yorker
“If you want to be reassured that you are special, you will hate
this book. But if you like thoughtful polemics, it is worth logging
off Facebook to read it.”—The Economist
“Brooks uses the powerful stories of people such as Augustine,
George Eliot and Dwight Eisenhower to inspire.”—The Times
(U.K.)
“Elegant and lucid . . . a pitch-perfect clarion call, issued not
with preachy hubris but from a deep place of humility, for
awakening to the greatest rewards of living . . . The Road to
Character is an essential read in its entirety—Anne Lamott with a
harder edge of moral philosophy, Seneca with a softer edge of
spiritual sensitivity, E. F. Schumacher for perplexed
moderns.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
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