Half of a very good book.

Let me give away the good half first, because it is genuinely good and I'd hate to see it buried under the complaining.

The argument that our institutions are built for one temperament and then described as neutral is correct, well evidenced, and worth the cover price by itself. Open-plan offices. Brainstorming, which turns out to produce worse ideas than the same people working alone and pooling afterwards. Group work in classrooms as a default rather than a choice. The chapter on Harvard Business School, where participation is graded and silence gets read as an absence of thought, does more damage than anything else in it — I've quoted it at two employers and I'd quote it at a third.

Now the half I'd cut. A thick layer of pop-neuroscience sits over the top, some of it resting on work that hasn't survived the last decade well, and the book leans on it in precisely the places where the sociology would have been stronger unaided. That high-reactive infant material is fascinating, and it's also a much smaller finding than the use it gets put to here. You don't need a brain scan to justify preferring a quiet room.

Then there's the flattery, which I object to on principle. Somewhere around the third chapter it stops describing a temperament and starts congratulating one. Introverts as deeper listeners, better leaders under certain conditions, the true engine of creative work. Some of that is defensible. The accumulation isn't. I've watched this get used as a personality horoscope by readers who mostly wanted permission to be rude at parties, and while no author controls that, the tone invites it.

Neil, the most extroverted man I've ever met, read it because I wouldn't stop going on about it, and he made the objection I keep returning to. He said the flattery is corrective, not descriptive. A book aimed at people who have spent thirty years being told they aren't team players has to overshoot, because the baseline they're being pulled back from sits so far off centre. I think he's right. I also think that's precisely why it grates on me, and I am one reader with one temperament and no particular claim on the average.

The other thing I'll concede: the parenting section gives the most practically useful writing about children I've read outside a manual. That distinction between a shy child and a child with a lower threshold for stimulation changed how a friend of mine handles birthday parties, and I have seen the difference in the child, at a party, with my own eyes.

So: five. A four-star argument inside a seven-star sales package, and the packaging is what gets talked about. Hand someone the office chapters photocopied and keep the rest.