The Social Animal

The Social Animal by David Brooks
Fiction (sort of)

I know I haven’t posted a lot in a while because things have been so busy with school, so I decided to just make some of the reviews short so I can get through more books.  I always want to make sure that I have time to read, even if I might not have a lot of time to write long reviews. Right now I am reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, which argues that humans are prone to making systematic irrational errors, so I will probably have more to add to this review when I am done with it.

 In The Social Animal, David Brooks follows the lives of two fictional characters, Harold and Erica, while examining human behavior through psychology, sociology, and biology. Brooks argues that human behavior can largely be understood by looking at the brain on a subconscious level. Brooks uses the lives of Harold and Erica as tools in order to demonstrate these patterns of behavior in action. Brooks's book provides interesting insight into the society that we live in and our own actions.