Quiet

By -
Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

Susan Cain has been generating quite a bit of buzz lately with her TED talk about how it's not bad to be an introvert. I hadn't meant to read the book right away, but I ran into it so I thought I might as well.

It's quite interesting! Cain talks about what we know now about the various elements of personality and the spectrum of extro/introversion. For about a century now, Americans have admired extroversion and deplored introversion, and the results have not always been good--we need to understand and respect both viewpoints.

Cain goes around and visits various locations and events; she heads out to Saddleback Church to learn about how Christian evangelism admires extroversion and unintentionally makes the quieter folks unhappy. She goes to a Tony Robbins seminar, which sounds an awful lot like hell. Then she visits a weekend retreat for highly-sensitive folks and realizes that without a few outgoing folks to liven things up, the quiet becomes deafening.

I learned in this book that IBM used to have a company song! When I mentioned it to my dad, he promptly started singing it. He used to work for IBM and apparently they tried to make him into a sales guy at one point.

It's a very interesting book that really tries to share the message that both kinds of people are important; we can't really do without either one. But we also need to try harder to understand, respect, and use the introverts around us, because they have a lot to contribute.

Comments

  1. *ೃ༄ JillianApril 6, 2012 at 11:11 AM

    Sounds fascinating!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousApril 6, 2012 at 4:50 PM

    I haven't read this yet but it's always nice to see someone sticking up for us introverts. We are useful and interesting too! :p

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more