Most Popular Books by David Brooks

In his bestselling work of “comic sociology,” David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation. Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success—“résumé virtues”—and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. “Joy,” David Brooks writes, “is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.” Praise for The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian “Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts.”—USA Today

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way: The unconscious mind, it turns out, is not a dark, vestigial place, but a creative one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made—the natural habitat of The Social Animal. Brooks reveals the deeply social aspect of our minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. He demolishes conventional definitions of success and looks toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. It is an essential book for our time—one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

The author of the acclaimed bestseller Bobos in Paradise, which hilariously described the upscale American culture, takes a witty look at how being American shapes us, and how America''s suburban civilization will shape the world''s future. Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat. You see suburban guys at Home Depot doing that special manly, waddling walk that American men do in the presence of large amounts of lumber; super-efficient ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize the PTA, and weigh less than their children; workaholic corporate types boarding airplanes while talking on their cell phones in a sort of panic because they know that when the door closes they have to turn their precious phone off and it will be like somebody stepped on their trachea. Looking at all this, you might come to the conclusion that we Americans are not the most profound people on earth. Indeed, there are millions around the world who regard us as the great bimbos of the globe: hardworking and fun, but also materialistic and spiritually shallow. They''ve got a point. As you drive through the sprawling suburbs or eat in the suburban chain restaurants (which if they merged would be called Chili''s Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina), questions do occur. Are we really as shallow as we look? Is there anything that unites us across the divides of politics, race, class, and geography? What does it mean to be American? Well, mentality matters, and sometimes mentality is all that matters. As diverse as we are, as complacent as we sometimes seem, Americans are united by a common mentality, which we have inherited from our ancestors and pass on, sometimes unreflectingly, to our kids. We are united by future-mindedness. We see the present from the vantage point of the future. We are tantalized, at every second of every day, by the awareness of grand possibilities ahead of us, by the bounty we can realize just over the next ridge. This mentality leads us to work feverishly hard, move more than any other people on earth, switch jobs, switch religions. It makes us anxious and optimistic, manic and discombobulating. Even in the superficiality of modern suburban life, there is some deeper impulse still throbbing in the heart of average Americans. That impulse is the subject of this book.

A woman and an older man meet by accident at a restaurant and find themselves dining together, during the course of which intimate stories, confessions, and questions arise.

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.

Originally published as: Bobos in Paradise: the new upper class and how they got there, 2000; and: On Paradise Drive: how we live now (and always have) in the future tense, 2004.

''Our lives with non-human animals are characterised by a kind of unremitting contempt. Habits of life, traditions of thought, and failures of imagination have rendered us blind to their invitations to companionship within a shared world. And philosophy, alas, has offered little to assuage our moral incomprehension, our soul blindness, preferring to make what appeal it can through the languid language of ‘rights’ or the calculus of sentient suffering. Over the last few decades, it has fallen increasingly to novelists, like J.M. Coetzee, and poets, like David Brooks – artists whose language has slipped the leash, if you will, of ‘pure reason’ – to awaken us to the possibility of moral encounter with non-human animals. Brooks’s essay Turin is truly a startling achievement. It startles us from an impoverished slumber, leaving us wondering how we could have been so blind to the gentle presence, the insistent voices, the sly wisdom, the subtle reproach, the offers of friendship held out by our non-human companions. The world cannot help but look different once Brooks rips way the veil of our all-too-human conceit.'' — Scott Stephens Scott Stephens is the religion and ethics editor of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the co-host (with Waleed Aly) of The Minefield on ABC Radio National. He is the author of On Contempt (forthcoming from Melbourne University Press).

Author''s first collection of short stories. The book of Sei and other stories received high critical acclaim.

This book is about how society continues to reel from generations of children seemingly raised without proper instruction in values, ethics and morals. Since schools will be asked to serve that function, this book tells why school involvement is a must.

Hardware acceleration in the form of customized datapath and control circuitry tuned to specific applications has gained popularity for its promise to utilize transistors more efficiently. Historically, the computer architecture community has focused on general-purpose processors, and extensive research infrastructure has been developed to support research efforts in this domain. Envisioning future computing systems with a diverse set of general-purpose cores and accelerators, computer architects must add accelerator-related research infrastructures to their toolboxes to explore future heterogeneous systems. This book serves as a primer for the field, as an overview of the vast literature on accelerator architectures and their design flows, and as a resource guidebook for researchers working in related areas.

Animal Dreams collects David Brooks’ thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian and international literature and culture, from ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to Rainer Maria Rilke and The Turin Horse, to live-animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native and non-native species. In his piercing, elegant, widely celebrated style, he considers how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species, and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward, in what he calls ‘the immense work of undoing’. For readers interested in animal welfare, conservation, and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams will be an essential, richly rewarding companion. Praise for Animal Dreams ‘one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers’ – Peter Pierce, The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘No one writes about animals like David Brooks.’ – Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (author of The Assault on Truth, When Elephants Weep and Lost Companions) ‘Beautifully written and emotionally and intellectually enthralling. The best book I have ever read on relations between humans and animals and the ‘redress’ we owe them. It makes you angry, it makes you weep; it makes you determined to rethink and to act.’ – Helen Tiffin, FAHA (co-author of The Empire Writes Back and Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutang)

Writing well, and persuasively, is not only a discipline that can be learned, it is one deeply rooted in the classical arts of rhetoric and polemic. This book introduces the essential skills, rules, and steps for producing effective political prose appropriate to many contexts, from the editorial, the op-ed, and the polemical essay to others both weighty and seemingly slight.

''We need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism.'' - Yanis Varoufakis ''Capitalism over the past twenty-five years has been an incredible moral good.'' - David Brooks The Munk debate on capitalism There is a growing belief that the capitalist system no longer works. Inequality is rampant. The environment is being destroyed for profits. In some western nations, life expectancy is even falling. Political power is wielded by wealthy elites and big business, not the people. But for proponents of capitalism, it is the engine of progress, not just making all of us materially better off, but helping to address everything from women''s rights to political freedoms. We seem to stand at a crossroads: do we need to fix the system as a matter of urgency, or would it be better to hold our nerve?

No sooner had the EPA established the Superfund program in 1980 to clean up the nation’s toxic waste dumps and other abandoned hazardous waste sites, than a little Montana town found itself topping the new program’s National Priority List. Milltown, a place too small to warrant a listing in the U.S. Census, sat alongside a modest hydroelectric dam at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers. For three-quarters of a century, arsenic-laced waste from some of the world’s largest copper-mining operations had accumulated behind the dam. Soon, Milltown became the site of Superfund’s first dam removal and watershed restoration, marking a turning point in U.S. environmental history. The story of this dramatic shift is the tale of individuals rallying to reclaim a place they valued beyond its utility. In Restoring the Shining Waters, David Brooks gives an intimate account of how local citizens—homeowners, university scientists, county health officials, grassroots environmentalists, business leaders, and thousands of engaged residents—brought about the removal of Milltown Dam. Interviews with townspeople, outside environmentalists, mining executives, and federal officials reveal how the everyday actions of individuals got the dam removed and, in the process, pushed Superfund to allow more public participation in decision making and to emphasize restoration over containment of polluted environments. A federal program designed to deal with the toxic legacies of industrialization thus became a starting point for restoring America’s most damaged environments, largely through the efforts of local communities. With curiosity, conviction, and a strong sense of place, the small town of Milltown helped restore an iconic western river valley—and in doing so, shaped the history of Superfund and modern environmentalism.

This is a primer written for computer architects in the new and rapidly evolving field of deep learning. It reviews how machine learning has evolved since its inception in the 1960s and tracks the key developments leading up to the emergence of the powerful deep learning techniques that emerged in the last decade. Machine learning, and specifically deep learning, has been hugely disruptive in many fields of computer science. The success of deep learning techniques in solving notoriously difficult classification and regression problems has resulted in their rapid adoption in solving real-world problems. The emergence of deep learning is widely attributed to a virtuous cycle whereby fundamental advancements in training deeper models were enabled by the availability of massive datasets and high-performance computer hardware. It also reviews representative workloads, including the most commonly used datasets and seminal networks across a variety of domains. In addition to discussing the workloads themselves, it also details the most popular deep learning tools and show how aspiring practitioners can use the tools with the workloads to characterize and optimize DNNs. The remainder of the book is dedicated to the design and optimization of hardware and architectures for machine learning. As high-performance hardware was so instrumental in the success of machine learning becoming a practical solution, this chapter recounts a variety of optimizations proposed recently to further improve future designs. Finally, it presents a review of recent research published in the area as well as a taxonomy to help readers understand how various contributions fall in context.

A writer questions the architecture of words, struggling to capture his ideas before they are lost; a husband excavating beneath his house becomes mesmerised by silence and disappears in search of solitude; a lighthouse keeper dreams that he is a man dreaming that he is the keeper of a lighthouse. Magnificent in its scope and imagery, David Brooks’ mastery of the written word is eclipsed in this thought-provoking collection. Both evocative and experimental, Brooks’ stories conjure fragments of memory and time, capturing streetscapes and heartscapes in a mosaic-style splendour.Lyrical and perceptive, brave and illuminating, Napoleon’s Roads explores the richness of language and the possibilities of expression, while exemplifying some of the most sophisticated, polished and beautiful contemporary literature in Australia today.

Note: This book is available in several languages: Russian, Chinese, English. The ability to organise and measure performance is a key part of the implementation of IT Service Management processes. This publication contains practical information on the provision of useful and meaningful metrics, as well as how best to use them within an organisation, including generic principles (such as SMART and KISS), specific examples and templates for the use of each metricAll metrics discussed are directly related to process objectives, in order to help create a service-focused management system. This publication complements the ITIL, CobiT and ISO20000 service management principles. If you need to develop metrics for an IT environment, buy this book or hire a consultant who has read it G. Kieliszek, Healthcare CIO (Amazon) "This is more than a book, it''s a practical, useable "A to Z" of IT Service Management Metrics! Peter Brooks (Author) has given us all a crystal clear view of a neglected, blurred piece of the IT Service Management puzzle. As a Principal ITSM Consultant working for Foster-Melliar in South Africa I am continuously disappointed by the many ITSM books produced that generally regurgitate what is already known by many in the industry. Metrics for IT Service Organisations provides a vast array of possible audiences something that many ITSM volumes do not, and this is a Practical, useable view of "How" to plan for, design, manage and improve the critical measures IT Service organisations require from both a strategic, tactical and operational perspective. I don''t carry many books around with me, this one, I most certainly will!!" Ian Clark Principal ITSM Consultant Foster-Melliar "With all the focus on IT Governance and IT Business process management. It is easy to see why metric are becoming hugely important for the management of organisations. In reality however, getting the right set of metrics in place is by no means a simple exercise. Metrics for IT service organisations can be a great help. Using ITIL as the basis the book lists many useful examples of metrics. But what is more important, is that it gives us insight into to creation of "good" metrics and the dangers of "bad" metrics. " Emma Speakman IT BPM consultant SA/NL/UK "Looking for a comprehensive, in-depth exploration and explanation of what metrics to use in your ITSM journey? Then ''Metrics for IT Service Organizations'' by Peter Brooks may be exactly what you''re looking for. This (new) book not only covers what metrics need to be seriously considered, but explains the ''why'' and ''how'' behind selecting and defining them, pointing out along the way many of the dangers and pitfalls of selecting the wrong ones; or too many. If you tend to agree that ''what gets measured gets done'', then applying the ideas in Peter''s book will assist you in getting the right things done." Ken Wendle (FISM) previous President of the itSMF USA, works as a Senior Solution Architect for Hewlett Packard''s OpenView Software division Given that itSMF is the source, readers of this book will naturally expect a ''best practices'' view on metrics, and a highly practical reference text. More particularly, though, the special merit of the text is its carefulness in stressing that metrics must be both useful and meaningful, and that the meaning comes from the business perspective on IT management processes - a perspective always represented by a stated business objective. By encouraging readers to seriously commit to defining clear business objectives, the text aims the reader at measurement that avoids excess or irrelevance. Malcolm Ryder (CA Architect)

A study of one of the most intense and formative periods of modern political history. The years 1899-1914 witnessed a fundamental challenge to many Victorian values and institutions: Free Trade, the new Poor Law, the House of Lords, the Irish Union - all were under attack, while organized labour and the feminist movement displayed an unprecedented assertiveness and aggression. Drawing on a variety of sources, this work examines what made these years the most politically turbulent between the Chartist era and today. It emphasizes the long shadow cast by the South African War, and the challenges to national identity posed by imperialism and by the Irish nationalist movement. Consideration is also given to the 1906 Liberal landslide victory and the way in which this aroused expectations that could not always be fulfilled. The author offers his own perspectives on the leading figures of the day - Chamberlain, Balfour, Lloyd George, Asquith and Churchill. While the emphasis of the book is on political thought, the author also sets his discussion within the broader context of social and economic change. This study is designed for A'' level and undergraduate students of Edwardian history.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.

This is a biography of Dan Levenson, an old-time banjo and fiddle player from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Between 1987 and 1991, Dan worked for Goose Acres Folk Music Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he dove deeply into old-time music. In the late 1980s, he formed the Boiled Buzzards; they recorded four albums between 1989 and 1994 and were a consistently active presence at old-time music festivals. He also played with Bob Frank during that time as one-half of the Hotfoot Duo. In 1995, he teamed up with Kim Murley and recorded New Frontier: Instrumentals from China and America. Levenson undertook his first cross-country trip as a solo performer in 1996. His traveling workshop "Meet the Banjo" ran with the sponsorship of Deering Banjos from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Dan recorded three projects in the first five years of the 2000s and began editing the quarterly "Old Time Way" section for Banjo Newsletter in 2005. He continues performing old-time music, teaching fiddle and banjo, writing instructional and repertoire books featuring banjo and fiddle tunes for Mel Bay, and making plans for more old-time music projects.