How We Are: Book One of the How to Live Trilogy

Publisher Marketing: The first book in a major new trilogy one that will help readers everywhere live fuller, more satisfying lives."We live in small worlds.""How We Are" is an astonishing debut and the first part of the monumental How to Live trilogy, a profound and ambitious work that gets to the heart of what it means to be human: how we are, how we break, and how we mend. This first book explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. We live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of comfortable routine what author Vincent Deary calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, so for the most part we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something comes along to disturb our small worlds some news from elsewhere. And with reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two. Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has witnessed the theater of change how ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and finally transform for the better. He is keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers, and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists. Drawing on his own personal experience and a staggering range of literary, philosophical, and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition. Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being habit machines and make our acts and our lives more fully our own." Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2014 (EAN 9780374172107, Hardcover) Booklist 12/01/2014 pg. 4 (EAN 9780374172107, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 11/24/2014 pg. 66 (EAN 9780374172107, Hardcover) BookPage 01/01/2015 (EAN 9780374172107, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Deary, Vincent Vincent Deary is a health psychologist at Northumbria University who specializes in helping people change their lives for the better. "How We Are" is his first book.