The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
    • Shows & On demand
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

CultureLiterature

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain | Book review
12 March 2013
The editorial unit
Avatar
The editorial unit
12 March 2013

In a promotional interview with Amazon.com, Susan Cain compares her decision to write Quiet – a whistle-stop digest of the problems faced by shy people in the loud and brash contemporary US – to Betty Friedan’s publication of The Feminine Mystique 50 years ago. In the book’s opening sections meanwhile, Cain sets out her stall with repeated references to the civil rights movement, quickly stating that “our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race.”

The next 270-plus pages examine the shaping influence of personality, through the multifarious lenses of business, neurobehavioural psychology, and cultural anthropology, concluding with a less clearly-defined cocktail of the three, from which Cain pours a series of saccharine pabulums: “Love is essential…Cherish your nearest and dearest…Relationships make everyone happier”. The real meat of the book, and its justification of the reader’s time (if not the lofty claims its author makes for its importance), comes in the first three quarters.

A former Wall Street lawyer, Cain is an able corporate historian who turns up some fascinating accounts, often marginalia, on the early motivational techniques of big business (IBM salesmen warming up for a day of work with a group rendition of “Selling IBM/We’re Selling IBM” to the tune of Singin’ in the Rain is a particular highlight). Her insights on the current schools of psychology on the introvert/extrovert debate are also interesting and open up the field for lay readers admirably, even while subtly cheerleading for the quiet, thoughtful, “high-reactives” throughout.

It’s when Cain tries to stretch the models she forms in these sections over the shape-shifting mass of the global culture that her thesis stumbles badly. The argument that we should attach such momentous importance to introversion, by Cain’s own admission just one of the millions of temperaments the human brain is able to kick-start in person’s a lifetime, just isn’t persuasive enough.

In a world whose financial system hadn’t been lastingly crippled by posturing and excessive risk, it’s hard to believe Quiet would have become a bestseller (the book’s Amazon page links to a number of similar titles that weren’t advertised on the tube). There are few more loathed figures in the current popular consciousness than those of loud, decadent and unthinking city boys. But the straight-faced implication that such outsized personalities are equally tyrannous as centuries of racial or sexual repression is at once silly and tasteless.

★★★★★

The editorial unit

Quiet is published by Penguin on 3rd January 2013. For further information or to order a copy visit the book’s website here.

Related Itemsreview

More in Literature

Ten short literary collections to get you back into reading

Rosamund Kelby
Read More

Five books to read in 2021

Lilly Subbotin
Read More

2020 roundup: Top five book releases of the year

Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

Five books to read this Christmas

Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

Trio by William Boyd

★★★★★
Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

★★★★★
Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

★★★★★
Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

★★★★★
Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

★★★★★
Elizaveta Kolesova
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap
  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • You Me at Six – Suckapunch
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • An interview with Ifrah Ismael: Tales from the Front Line and other stories
    Theatre
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Persian Lessons
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • The White Tiger
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Female filmmakers lead nominees for the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards
    Cinema
  • Persian Lessons: Exclusive new clip
    Cinema
  • Jeremiah Fraites: Piano Piano
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Quo Vadis, Aida?
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Ten short literary collections to get you back into reading
    Literature
  • Mayor
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

The Croods | Movie review
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival opens with Promised Land at the Barbican | Movie review