July Book Club

Note: All the upcoming books and those that we didn’t select are listed at the bottom of this section.

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks

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.

Becky will be moderating this month. Hope you can join us for some thoughtful discussion.

Upcoming books: (August is the next book selection month.)
August: Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (Pat)
September: Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell (Pat/Kathy)

Not selected this time:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold
Change of Heart: A Novel by Jodi Picoult
When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter