Road to Character

The No. 1 New York Times bestseller on the secret to leading a good lifeWe live in a Big Me culture: universities and businesses alike reward goal-oriented superstars and those who self-promote are most likely to thrive. But what does this say about us?David Brooks argues that our hunger for wealth and status is eroding our ability to create meaningful inner lives. To show us how to live better, he looks at people whose sense of humility was fundamental to their success. What they all understood was a simple but counterintuitive truth: in order to fulfil yourself, you must learn how to forget yourself.

The Road to Character feels particularly pertinent to some immediate issues right now: the level of public cynicism about politicians and "experts", witnessed in the catastrophic EU referendum, or the bland managerialism that is replacing discussion about the core values of our educational system, Profound and eloquent . . . written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance, A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin . . . worth logging off Facebook to read it, Everyone concerned about the good life should read this book, A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story . . . In the age of the selfie, Brooks wishes to exhort us back to a semiclassical sense of self-restraint, self-erasure and self-suspicion

David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and frequent broadcaster. His previous books include the bestsellers The Social Animal and Bobos in Paradise. His New York Times columns reach over 800,000 readers across the globe.