Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman

I think my relatively neutral feelings towards this book were largely a product of reading it ten years too late: perhaps had I picked it up right upon its being published, or right as the hype machine was in full force, I would have been struck by something new or interesting. As it was, though, I found that I had already been exposed to most of the ideas—whether through casual conversations, reading Howard Gardner on mutiple intelligences, or, most crucially, though discussions of Peircean semiotics—and so this book was, if anything, a refresher course.

And, like any good college course, the lecturer has his credentials. I expected the author to be much more “journalist interviewing the experts” type (a la Malcolm Gladwell), instead of a real psychologist himself (albeit, of course, a psychologist-cum-journalist). He was, as far as I could tell, solid on the research, and even if he didn’t include all the details in the text, for the sake of a reading public without PhD’s, the footnotes were comprehensive and accurate.

The information was similarly dense—though well-organized, of course, the writing style lacked pizzazz, which made the text, interesting in its subject matter, almost boring to read. Goleman frequently used real-life examples and short anecdotes, but then almost never made reference to them later in the chapter; they were, instead, just a garnish to attract the reader’s eye, not a spice to keep the reader interested. His argument was a good one—emotions are critically important to the human condition, and we need to teach our children to handle them correctly—but I would have enjoyed more concrete suggestions on how to teach children, how to keep emotions in line. I suppose he saved that for his long series of sequels—emotional intelligence in relationships, emotional intelligence at work, etc.

In sum, this was fine to pass the time on a long journey, but not really an earth-shaker or ground-mover of any kind. I didn’t think it was terrible, and I didn’t think it was brilliant. I guess you could say it didn’t really affect my emotions at all.