FSA Book Club Meeting: How to Know a Person, by David Brooks

Join us for our monthly autistic book club meeting! This meeting is a combined meeting between Full Spectrum Agency for Autistic Adults and our autistic/allistic alliance group, Full Spectrum Agency Friends and Family Group. The book for May 2024 is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, by David Brooks.

Though this is not an autistic book, we thought it felt relevant as a bestselling book from 2023 about engaging more deeply with other people and seeing them more clearly. Let's give this book a read from an autistic lens: does it apply to some of the social challenges we encounter as autistic people? Are there useful skills? Might this help allistic people understand autistic people better, or vice versa?

As with all of our book clubs, do not feel that you must have read the whole book (or even part of the book) to attend—just come with whatever you have. Engage in and enjoy a free-form discussion based around the themes of the book.
Additionally, you may want to watch the following video of the author presenting the main themes of the book in a lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwENbKn3tqI

Publisher's Description:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster 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 we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: 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 his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, a writer for The Atlantic, and appears regularly on PBS Newshour. He is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive.