David Brooks, one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators, delivers a practical, heartfelt guide in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. In order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives, Brooks digs into the essential conversations and questions of any community or relationship: how do we feel seen?
Q&A with award-winning author Timothy Egan.
All tickets, with the exception of a limited number of Pay What You Can tickets, include a copy of How to Know a Person, shipped to the ticket holder’s door by our partner bookstore, University Book Store.
As 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.
David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive.
Timothy Egan is the author of ten books. His most recent, A Fever in the Heartland, is a historical thriller that was an immediate New York Times bestseller. “Brisk” “Powerful” and “Gripping,” wrote the Times. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “a harrowing look at forgotten chapter in American history.” A lifelong journalist, Mr. Egan worked as a national correspondent and opinion columnist for the New York Times, roaming the West. As a Times correspondent, he shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 with a team of reporters for its series, “How Race is Lived in America.”
