For too long we’ve been silent about being silent.

Publisher: Broadway (Random House)
Pages: 266
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-307-35215-6
First Published: 2012
Date Reviewed: 29th January 2013
Rating: 4.5/5

Cain explores the history of personality and details experiments and social situations to tell her readers why introverts are important and why they’ve been relegated to second-class citizen status.

Quiet is a rather good, often provocative book that seeks to change the way the world works. Drawing on her personal experience and research, Cain has compiled a thorough document that is both an explanation and a manual for change.

The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.

Cain begins by explaining how there hasn’t always been this conscious split in the western culture, between those who are quiet and those who are louder. It is very interesting, however she doesn’t allow the facts of this to be the focus of her book, in other words her aim is not to go back to the days when to be quiet was preferred, rather it is to create a balance in society where both extroverts and introverts are valued equally. The focus is the overall way in which society has come to value the traits of extroverts, for example that teamwork and the insistence that prospective employees have people skills has caused a skew, leaving introverts at a loss, literally, and favouring a sector of society that, Cain says (and uses evidence to back up) accounts for at the most two thirds of the population.

If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day.

Cain highlights the fact that introverts are often better off working alone as opposed to in teams, that team-building days and brainstorming sessions can make it appear as if they have nothing to contribute. Indeed one of Cain’s hopes is that society will not be so obsessed in future with open-plan offices. And in case anyone is reading the book and thinking that she is wrong in her suggestions, Cain spends a chapter looking at other cultures (as opposed to the US) and how they value introversion more. She looks at how Chinese Americans function in American schools and the way they feel they must adapt – and, of course, how they feel America is does it wrong sometimes. This is not to say that some white Americans don’t feel this way, but in highlighting an obviously different cultural group Cain is able to enforce her point.

A big part of the book, even if it is only most obvious at the end, is Cain’s wish to impart teaching ideas and methods for parents to better support their children. For example, Cain describes the extreme of extroverted parents who seek medication for their child, not understanding why the child is quiet. She suggests how classrooms could work better and speaks of how school is so important to get right, how teachers should stop including on report cards the wish that a child would speak more. This is an understandable part of the book but due to its focus on children it could be off-putting for the childless reader or simply just a reader looking for something more adult-orientated. It’s true that a great deal of the book looks at adults, but there isn’t the same dedication in those parts as there is this latter section.

However the main area of the book that is an issue is the bias. Although it is obvious that this book will be quite subjective, the way in which Cain pushes for the rights of introverts can be rather strong, even for the introverted reader. Cain does a great job of being balanced and talks of how both personality types are important, but there are occasions where she becomes a bit of a preacher and denigrates extroverts. If this book was targeted only to introverts that wouldn’t be so much of a problem, it would be more of a book for “bigging up” a reader, but as it is plain that the author plans for anyone to find it accessible, these moments of sudden power are not appropriate.

As Americans moved into cities, working with strangers was needed.

The prospective reader may be interested to know that besides the obvious focus on the artistically inclined – the writer who holes themselves up in their study – there is a great deal of time spent on famous figures in technology, science (this beyond those conducting experiments), and politics. Thus the book would appeal to people who look up to the various leaders in computing, and there is time spent documenting the lead up to black freedom.

Quiet is quiet by nature, but the book has its loud moments. It may not always be objective but at least the intentions of the author make understandable, if not quite acceptable. The few quizzes in the book allow those on the fence to find out who they are in the context of the material. It’s true that there is some repetition in the book, phrases and ideas repeated more than a couple of times, but overall the product is a success. The book will appeal to anyone who considers themselves, well, quiet, shunned by their peers and interested in changes. It will also appeal to teachers looking for insight, and also extroverts – as long as the bias doesn’t put them off (this is the reason the bias is such an issue, because this sort of book needs to be accessible to all). Will it change the world? Who knows? But it might just change a life or two.

I received this book for review from Crown Publishers.

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