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 #1 New York Times
bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second MountainIf you are going to care for
someone you must first understand them. If you're going to hire marry or befriend someone
you have to be able to see them. If you are going to work closely with someone you have to be
able to make them feel recognized and valued. As David Brooks observes "The older I get the
more I come to the certainty that there is one skill at the center of any healthy family
company classroom community or nation: the ability to see each other to know other people
to make 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 to 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 Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and
neuroscience and from the worlds of theatre 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 towards others it helps readers 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 a profoundly creative act: 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 seeking to understand and yearning to be understood.
