It's hard to know what to write about this book. I've given it 5 stars as much for the ambitious efforts of David Brooks to pull together so many ideas in such an accessible format than for how much I enjoyed it.

I'm enjoying books at the moment that make me think and see things from a slightly different angle, without dazzling you with over-elaborate language or incomprehensible ideas. This certainly ticked the box, and may be why I enjoyed it so much. I found the first half or two-thirds more engaging and, I suppose, relevant for me. Pretty much from the moment Erica got asked to be involved in a Presidential campaign I felt as though there was a bit of a drift and, although there were still plenty of interesting ideas raised, especially around emotions, society and politics, I didn't really relate to them in quite the same way.

Having said that, there was some publicity about this book inspiring David Cameron's fairly incomprehensible "Big Society" campaign in the UK. Reading the passages about Harold writing for a think tank in Washington, and coming up with the idea for government that works differently to the way 20th century governments have done, I can see where the inspiration has come from. Brooks himself obviously thinks this is a pretty tough challenge though - "He never developed...an all-explaining system of good government. The world was too complex an organism for that, too filled with a hidden tangle of latent functions for some hyper-confident government to come in and reshape according to some pre-fab plan."