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David Brooks's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books David Brooks recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of David Brooks's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Consilience

The Unity of Knowledge

"A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." --The Wall Street Journal 

One of our greatest living scientists--and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants--gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience  (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the...
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Recommended by David Brooks, and 1 others.

David BrooksThis makes the prediction that a lot of the disciplines we have separated human behaviour into are obsolete, and that we are on the verge of unifying knowledge in an inter-disciplinary way. (Source)

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2
“In a work of outstanding clarity and sheer brilliance Steven Pinker banishes forever fears that a biological understanding of human nature threatens humane values.”
—Helena Cronin, author of The Ant and The Peacock

“A mind blowing, mind openingexpos. Pinker's profoundly positive arguments for the compatibility of biology and humanism are unrivalled for their scope and depth and should be mandatory, if disquieting, reading.”
—Patricia Goldman-Rakic, past president of the Society for Neuroscience

In The Blank Slate,...
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Recommended by David Brooks, and 1 others.

David BrooksAn argument against the old view that there is no such thing as human nature, that we’re all culturally determined. He brings together a ton of evidence that that’s wrong. (Source)

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3
Since ancient times, people have believed that breakthrough ideas come from the brains of geniuses with awesome rational powers. In recent years, however, the paradigm has begun to shift toward the notion that the source of creativity lies "out there," in the network of connections between people and ideas. In this provocative book, Richard Ogle crystallizes the nature of this shift, and boldly outlines "a new science of ideas." The key resides in what he calls "idea-spaces," a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics... more
Recommended by David Brooks, and 1 others.

David BrooksThis emphasises that ideas don’t just exist in one head, but they exist outside the mind, in a whole bunch of minds at once. (Source)

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4
Since Descartes famously proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am," science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—"one of the world’s leading neurologists" (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a... more
Recommended by David Brooks, Paul Thagard, and 2 others.

David BrooksDamasio worked with people who have suffered strokes and as a result are incapable of feeling emotion. And far from making good decisions, they make terrible decisions, and their lives fall apart. (Source)

Paul ThagardThis book understood emotion in terms of what the brain does – not as a kind of abstract computational process but very much tied in with the particular brain processes. (Source)

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5
In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world’s philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives. less

David BrooksHe argues that most of our moral decisions are that kind of an instant reaction. It’s like aesthetics: when we see a scene we know instantly if it’s beautiful or not. (Source)

Mike BenkovichHonourable Mentions: Four Hour Work Week, The Happiness Hypothesis, Meditations, Catch 22, A Guide To The Good Life. (Source)

Chelsea FrankI read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. (Source)

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