The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
Every good element of this book has been taken from better books and made worse. I kept reading to give it a chance to redeem itself, since I think there are useful arguments to advance on this book's premise, but instead it kept increasing the list of subjects the author rushes through: gender, childhood development, philosophy, atheism, moral theory, futurism, etc. By the time he claimed that most people pronounce MMORPG "mor-peg" I began to wonder if this was some kind of perverse experiment in being verifiably wrong about everything.I can see why some people like the book, but read almost any of the authors he references and you'll see how this is a mangled imitation. Although Pinker calls it "witty," it is a far-cry from such excellent scientific journalism as Gleick ("Chaos"). It has the flair and style of a marketer or a Daily Beast blog writer; with a primary goal of justified entertainment (indeed, one of the central arguments is that there is an evolutionary advantage to the entertainment provided by stories), he intermixes edgy sexuality, drug references, and admittedly-bad-taste examples as he throws around some shallow research and lots of hypotheticals about why stories are good for us. Of course, he's right on most accounts; but the style in general was distasteful fluff, and his findings were just science saying, "You know that thing you've always thought, that makes good sense? Science says, you're probably right." I would recommend it to friends who don't know why I research narrative if the writing weren't so sensational and unprincipled.
What do You think about The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012)?
Beautiful, concise and clear, this book is a must read if you like stories and narrative.
—Maria_a
Storytelling is ingrained in our human psyche. Well, of course it is!
—xristina819
