With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Moments columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Heaven, has long explored and explained just how we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional intelligence that produce his columns being among the most read within the nation, Brooks becomes to the building blocks of individual flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday routine.

This is actually the story of how success occurs. It is told through the lives of one about The Public Animal: The Hidden Resources of Love, Character, and Achievement composite American couple, Harold and Erica-how they develop, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of details into both of these vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new knowledge of individual nature. A technological revolution offers occurred-we have discovered more about the mind in the last thirty years than we had in the last three thousand. The unconscious mind, as it happens, is most of the mind-not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where a lot of the brain’s function gets done. This is the world of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, hereditary predispositions, personality traits, and cultural norms: the realm where character is usually produced and where our most important life decisions are created. The natural habitat from the Social Animal.

Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; in the “odyssey years” which have arrive to define youthful adulthood towards the high walls of poverty; from the type of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective command. He reveals the deeply sociable facet of our extremely minds and exposes the bias in contemporary culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes standard definitions of achievement while searching toward a lifestyle based on trust and humility.

The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Difficult to place down, it is an essential book for our time, one that could have broad social impact and can change just how we discover ourselves and the world.