LITERATURE + LECTURES

Prepare yourself for another great author event on Tuesday, March 29, as Brazos Bookstore welcomes author, David Brooks. From 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM he will discuss and sign his latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.

The bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise explores how human beings and communities flourish--drawing on the latest science and the oldest wisdom in a tour-de-force.

What if everything we think we know about what makes human beings tick - how we make choices, find our mates, achieve professional success, create happy homes, contribute meaningfully to society, and live according to important values and principles - is wrong?

In this mesmerizing, new book The Social Animal, David Brooks argues that this is close to being the case. In recent decades, a revolution has occurred in how we understand human nature, the mind, how we interact with our environments, and what are the seeds and conditions for human flourishing.

Our conscious minds, it turns out, are mere bit players: the real things that shape us, from motivation, to the choices we make, to the content of our character, bubble up from below: from the unconscious (which has 200,000 times more "processing power" than our conscious minds) and from our environment (from parents to neighborhoods to corporate work cultures). Brooks's book is the first to bring this wealth of new knowledge down to earth in a work of grand synthesis and observation, offering, in a completely engaging and glistening way, a powerful new understanding of how human success happens.

About the author: David Brooks started his op-ed column in The New York Times in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and he is a weekly commentator on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

He is the author of the bestseller Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.