Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Experience the book that started the Quiet Movement and revolutionized how the world sees introverts--and how introverts see themselves--by offering validation, inclusion, and inspiration
"Superbly researched, deeply insightful, and a fascinating read, Quiet is an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to understand the gifts of the introverted half of the population."--Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR-- People, O: The Oprah Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Inc., Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts--Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak--that we owe many of the great contributions to society.
In Quiet , Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts--from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, impeccably researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves.
Author Notes
Susan Cain graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She worked as a corporate lawyer before deciding to write Quiet and devote herself to the cause of empowering introverts. She is also the author of the children's book Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Horn Book Review
A distillation of the concepts in Cain's adult book Quiet, here focused on situations likely to affect kids and teens with anecdotes from young introverts. Quiet Power discusses the challenges of introversion as well as the titular strengths, providing the same validation as the original without being patronizing. Occasional cartoons lighten the overall tone. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
The author of the adult best-seller Quiet (2012) brings her introvert revolution to tweens and teens in this thought-provoking guide. Cain begins by defining introverts and extroverts, before questioning the Extrovert Ideal, in which society idolizes talkers and spotlight seekers. The text is divided into four typical settings in which introverts must interact with others: school, socializing, hobbies, and home. Chapters within these sections feature brief profiles of conventionally introverted kids and celebrities and explain how introverts normally react in these settings and problems that can arise. The emphasis, however, is on self-acceptance and the recognition of introverts' secret strengths, such as listening, reflection, and focus. Playful spot illustrations and comic panels will help Cain's advice connect with young readers, and each chapter ends with practical tips to empower introverts. The most notable chapter is on quiet leadership and how introverts make great, and possibly even better, leaders. Concluding guides for parents and educators help adults understand the introverts they are raising. For kids who want to roar on the inside.--Leeper, Angela Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I STILL REMEMBER reading books to my own kids, teenagers now, but I don't remember the last time someone read me a book, or even a paragraph, other than my husband barking out a snippet of the day's outrageous news. Yet I've never forgotten how different the experience of listening to prose is from reading or watching it transformed into film. It requires time and a mental stillness, the kind one has these days mainly in cars or other modes of transit. And so I set out to listen to the audio of young readers' versions of best-selling nonfiction in the car on trips upstate, often with my 13-year-old along to test their Y.A. appeal. We began with Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," read by the actor Macleod Andrews in a vaguely Midwestern, boyish cadence. I was one of those people who had avoided Pollan's book when it came out a decade back, certain that if I read it, I'd wake up not just rejecting high-fructose corn syrup but also unable to find sustenance anywhere in my country, or worse, morphed into an organic-baby-food-producing, vegan scold. Listening to the nightmarish story of American industrial farming - the tragedy of ghost towns in Iowa and the Midwest all given over to "America's 80-million-acre field of corn," a plant that Pollan compares to an alien invasion - was indeed disturbing. When he buys a steer to chart its journey to becoming meat, you know it won't end well, but what happens is even worse than you think. At one point, listening to the unfolding litany of disaster that is America's food system, the kid in the car opined that my generation "let this happen." I denied it, of course, but as a native Illinoisan who spent a few summers on chain gangs of teenage corn "de-tassellers" toiling in Cargill's cross-pollination fields, I suppose I am personally implicated in the fiasco. Tip: You might want to listen to this seven-and-a-half-hour book (the adult audio clocks in at nearly 16 hours) while on a long drive with your family, but you won't be able to stop and eat at the fast-food outlets serving the disgusting things Pollan calls "EFLS" - edible foodlike substances constructed with corn and sickly factory-farmed cow or chicken. So pack a picnic basket of organic goodies from the farmers market before setting off. After Pollan, we popped the marvelous work of Laura Hillenbrand into the CD player. The actor Edward Herrmann (who died in 2014) reads a shorter, Y.A.-friendly version of "Unbroken," the true story of the Olympic runner and P.O.W. Louis Zamperini. Hillenbrand begins with our hero, his plane having gone down in the Pacific, floating on a life raft encircled by sharks. She leaves him there and drifts back to the delinquent boy discovering he was the fastest runner in Torrance, Calif. Before long he is racing the 5,000-meter in the 1936 Olympics and meeting Hitler, then enlisting in the Army Air Corps, crashing, spending a record 47 days on that shark-encircled raft and entering a hellish Japanese P.O.W. camp. Hillenbrand is a true master of the English language (planes "etch" the sky, sharks "bristle" beneath the raft), and her writerly skill is delivered with a feel for the eras in which the book unfolds by Herrmann's orotund, World War II radio announcer voice, his accent just slightly out of time. I was so into this story that when I reached home as Zamperini was being shot at by the Japanese, I brought the CD out of the car and hurried it inside with me, to finish listening. Our third and fourth audiobooks didn't grip us like the first two. "The Boys in the Boat," by Daniel James Brown, is about the Depression-era Olympic gold-medal-winning United States rowing team. The five-and-a-half-hour audio of the version adapted for younger readers, read by the actor Mark Bramhall, is heavily veiled by fog and endlessly dripping cold rain as the author paints the Pacific Northwest setting. Marketed as a sort of natural companion to Hillenbrand's book, it lacks her sharp ear for language, and although it was a best seller, it's not clear why the world needed another book about how the Americans triumphed over Nazi Germany in the 1936 Olympics. The book is, however, evocative of the incredible hardship Americans endured during the Depression, and it strikes deep emotional chords: Before the first third of the story is over, the hero, Joe Rantz, has been abandoned by his family three times. We learn that he and the other rowers, working-class boys all, formed a "mystical bond" in the boat that they never forgot. Unfortunately, "Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts," by Susan Cain with Gregory Mone and Erica Moroz, didn't capture us either. We do have introverts in our household, and Cain explains that "a quiet temperament is a superpower," which is a nice way to look at it. But there's a gooey dose of psychobabble here, even presumably simplified for young people in this reworking of the adult book, along with a protest-too-much degree of reassurance that introverts are just as smart and worthy as extroverts. Perhaps there are people out there who don't already believe that, but we're not among them. There is a 24-question test by which the listener can determine what sort of "vert" he or she is, which might not be immediately obvious. I took it and found myself exactly in the middle - a so-called androvert, sort of surprising because I was a shy and bookish teenager. The book is full of tips for more introverted teenagers on how to navigate the noisy world, including finding a few close friends and accepting that "you might not get up in front of a stadium like Taylor Swift." The most interesting anecdote the self-described introvert Cain shares is that she came to realize that being quiet means people often listen more closely when she speaks. But the book, at least, isn't helped by its reader, the actress Kathe Mazur. My 13-year-old test-listener observed, "She has a voice that makes me want to go to sleep. You should write that." And so I have. NINA BURLEIGH is the national politics correspondent at Newsweek magazine and the author of five nonfiction books.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Beyoncé, J.K. Rowling, and Albert Einstein are examples of introverts who harnessed their "quiet power" to become iconic successes. Cain here offers an entertaining, illuminating adaptation of her adult best seller Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking to help younger readers to discover their own "superpowers," especially during the pivotal, challenging adolescent years. With plenty of supporting data-"introversion is also one of the most researched personality traits"-Cain explains how introverts and extroverts have different nervous systems and reactions to stimulation and that introverts are not antisocial, just "differently social." Using ordinary kids' experiences, which will resonate more effectively than those of the impossibly famous, Cain offers achievable, adaptive behaviors as antidotes to stress, including how to understand your needs, find "your own circle," communicate clearly, and move beyond your comfort zone. Kathe Mazur's crisp, encouraging narration will keep kids listening. VERDICT Since somewhere between a third and a half of the human population is introverted, Cain's potential audience is enormous, making this an ideal acquisition for all libraries with teen patrons. ["Many will find value in this title that emphasizes that being an introvert is not a blemish on one's personality but a benefit": SLJ 5/16 starred review of the Dial book.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The author of the bestselling Quiet (2012) collaborates with Mone and Moroz to bring her message of empowerment for quiet types to teen readers. Cain opens by placing introverts on "what's called a spectrum" (an infelicitous term, considering its more common usage in psychology) with extroverts on the opposite end and vaguely defined "ambiverts" in the middle. She goes on to draw from her own experiences as well as those of psychologists and a dozen or so first-name-only teens to affirm that there's nothing abnormal about preferring to work alone rather than in groups, thinking before speaking, being "differently social," and needing a place to unwind in solitude. Along with assuring less outgoing readers that they have plenty of company, from Einstein to Beyonc, she discusses distinctive "superpowers" that introverts can employspecifically at school and in managing peer relationshipseither for their own comfort or as coping mechanisms for public speaking and like stress producers. In her view "introverted" is not the same as "shy," but these techniques will be equally useful to both sorts of readers. For those with short attention spans she closes each chapter with summary lists of points and behavioral tools (for those with even shorter ones, Web cartoonist Snider converts many to visual form), and she goes on in a pair of afterwords to provide guidelines for parents and make a case against forced participation in classroom discussions. Standard-issue self-help: worthy enough but wordy and heavily earnest, addressed to a broad audience but unlikely to attract one. (notes, index) (Nonfiction. 13-17) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.