Episode-by-episode discussion of How to Know a Person by David Brooks — the art of seeing someone properly, and the questions that open a person up. Each episode takes one chapter and turns it into something you can use today. Part of The Connection Podcasts.
One chapter per episode, in the book's own order. Each episode stands on its own.
David Brooks grew up in a loving house that never said so out loud — Thanksgiving conversation ran to Victorian funerary monuments. His nursery teacher noticed the watching at age four. By junior year he could not work out why Bernice preferred another boy when he was obviously the better writer. This is a book about seeing people, written by someone who had to learn it late.
A couple staring into their phones. A first date where the man monologues at a spot six feet above her head for ten straight minutes. And Brooks on a barstool doing the worst version of it — the size-up, reading a bartender's tattoos into a whole personality. He used to make a living at this. He names the habit: Diminishing.
Waco, Texas, over diner breakfast with LaRue Dorsey, ninety-three, a retired teacher presenting herself as a drill sergeant: "I loved my students enough to discipline them." Brooks is intimidated. Then Jimmy Dorrell walks in grinning, and the woman at the table transforms in front of him. Illumination is what one person's gaze can do to another.
The naturalist Loren Eiseley breaks through a willow thicket into the Platte — a mile wide and an inch deep — hot, alone, and carrying a childhood terror of water. He lies back and lets the current take him, asking what it feels like to be a river. Accompaniment works the same way: you stop steering and go along with someone.
We discuss it chapter by chapter, but nothing replaces reading it. This is an Amazon affiliate link — it costs you nothing extra and it helps pay for the show.
4 episodes in this show, 1,100+ across the whole network, and a new one every day.
More chapter-by-chapter shows: How to Talk to Anyone · How to Win Friends and Influence People · The Next Conversation · Surrounded by Idiots
Educational commentary and review only — not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by David Brooks or the publisher. All discussion is transformative and used under Fair Use. No copyright infringement intended. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.