How to Know a Person cover art

How to Know a Person

The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

How to Know a Person

By: David Brooks
Narrated by: David Brooks
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £18.79

Buy Now for £18.79

About this listen

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person and fostering deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain

As 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 all around are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing essential questions: 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 determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and 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.
Ethics & Morality Personal Development Personal Success Philosophy Sociology

Critic reviews

Praise for the works of David Brooks

The Second Mountain

“Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”The Washington Post

The Road to Character

“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 New York Times Book Review

“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 Social Animal

“Provocative and fascinating . . . seeks to do nothing less than revolutionize our notions about how we function and conduct our lives.”The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Brooks’s considerable achievement comes in his ability to elevate the unseen aspects of private experience into a vigorous and challenging conversation about what we all share.”San Francisco Chronicle
No reviews yet