An introvert's Rosetta Stone. I saw myself on nearly every page and I didn't always enjoy the view.

I have spent forty-three years being told to speak up, and this book handed me back a piece of myself I did not know had been repossessed.

Cain's central insight, that our culture has quietly crowned the Extrovert Ideal and left the rest of us at the edge of the party holding a warm drink, is one of those truths that is obvious the second somebody says it out loud; obvious the way water is obvious to a fish. I underlined so much of the first three chapters that the underlining stopped meaning anything, which I suppose is a lesson in itself.

Where it loses a couple of marks, and it pains me to say so because the book has been a genuine balm, is the middle. There is a long stretch of business case studies and open-plan office research that reads like a corporate away day, and I felt my attention drift off down the river. The soul of it is in the personal passages. The science is scaffolding, and scaffolding is not architecture.

She is also, I think, a bit soft on us. Some of what I do is not a beautiful temperament quietly misunderstood by a loud world. Some of it is fear, and it has cost me things, and a chapter on that would have been braver than another study about Harvard Business School.

Still. My wife read the opening pages over my shoulder and said "well, that's you, that is," which is the closest thing to literary criticism she has offered in nineteen years of marriage.

Eight. Recommended to anyone who has ever hidden in a kitchen at a party.