The Road to Character

Why does Brooks spend more time discussing humility than any other aspect of self-mastery and improvement?

Brooks focuses on individuals who differ in gender, race, nationality, religion, values, and social class, but most of them, except for St. Augustine, seem to have lived between the years of 1700 to the present. Why did Brooks choose individuals spanning this particularly “modern” swath of human history?

Several of Brooks’ chapters focus on not one, but two individuals—Ida and Eisenhower, Randolph and Rustin, Namath and Unitas. What purpose do these pairings serve?

Many of the individuals highlighted in the book lived turbulent lives, whether due to self-inflicted or externally-caused circumstances. What function do these hardships serve for each individual, and how do they influence Brooks’ argument?

A slight majority of the individuals who Brooks examines are women. Do you feel that he has done enough to strike a gender balance in his subjects? Furthermore, how do the lives of the men he discusses compare to the lives of the women he discusses? Compare and contrast these gender dynamics.

Sometimes Brooks’ insistence that we have forgotten to live by an earlier “moral ecology” comes off as nostalgia for points in history that were, objectively, less progressive and more dangerous eras in which to live. Does he counterbalance this trend sufficiently, or could he have done more to temper it?

Does Brooks offer enough evidence that the qualities he is promoting will genuinely lead to a more socially-conscious, positive, and supportive society, or is the evidence drawn from real-life examples somewhat lacking?

For a self-help book, The Road to Character takes an approach that feels more like a historian’s, biographer’s, or even novelist’s at points. Is this a strength or a weakness? If the former, how does it serve the narrative; if the latter, how is it detrimental to Brooks’ argument and program for self-improvement?