"Shrinking Violets" by Joe Moran was an interesting insightful peek into the history and understanding shyness. Thank you NetGalley, the author and publisher.

I wish this book had been around when I was a kid...Parents of shy children should have to read this book. As a matter of fact, anyone who knows a "shy" child should read it and learn a bit of empathy. Very good read , in my opinion. Should be required reading for every adult who works with children.

Shrinking Violets takes us into the world of shyness and some of the great people who were shy. We are shown by shy people themselves what it means to be shy.

In Shrinking Violets Joe Moran has effectively captured what I as a shy person have said for years: there is a spectrum of shyness that can lead some of us to be functional while others seem to be paralyzed and fear possessed by even the very thought of human interaction. Shrinking Violets is not a history per se, but rather sort of how shyness has developed over the decades by offering sketches of some notably successful people who were either inhibited by or moved beyond their shyness. I guess the overall takeaway is that shyness doesn’t mean you won’t be successful.

It would be crazy to suggest that shyness doesn’t impact a person’s life, but maybe through this book people will learn that shyness is a unique and special thing instead of just people being weird or anti-social as I have often encountered. People who are shy go through their own journey of shyness and sometimes it doesn’t make much sense to us either. So I hope that this book can help spark a conversation between the shy and the outgoing about what it means to be shy.

This was an insightful book, giving the reader and insight into historical references, and attitudes to, shyness, from ancient Greek philosophy to modern musicians. The writing was easy to follow and the structure logical. The language was easy to understand and the the writing passionate.

Shyness is about much more than just shrinking away. Violets "shrink" not in retreating from the world but in evincing nature's talent for endless variation and for sustaining life in the most varied habitats. Shyness, too, can flourish in many climates and soils and express itself in many ways. It can, like the violet, be accompanied by a surprising resilience, even stubbornness.

Maybe everything that shy people are capable of, and what's going on behind their scenes, is much more complex than the outgoing might assume - it's not only about fear, insecurity, or an uncomfortable degree of introversion.

In Shrinking Violets, author Joe Moran dips into the lives and works of some well-known or well-documented shy people throughout history, aligning their personalities, quirks, and studies and writing with common traits, symptom-like, of shyness. Within this "collective biography", there are some memoir-esque passages, but in the introduction he writes that he didn't want the book to be his memoir, and the sections where something personal slips in are subtle and contribute nicely to the situations or examples he's illustrating. He admits that he's shy, hence his interest in the topic, but it's not meant to be all about him. To make it more universal, there's also interesting coverage of what shyness might mean evolutionarily, and how it presents in some corners of the animal kingdom.

I appreciated the stories of many others who had suffered shyness, leading them to study it, work around it, philosophize about it, and make art despite it. Some of the chapters went a little deep in depth for me, on musicians and the like, and the people covered here who are afflicted with shyness are afflicted in the extreme. It seemed that the light, everyday shyness that I think the majority of people identifying as shy live with wasn't much in focus in favor of the extreme examples.

There's also a heavy skew towards the arts, although Moran provides an interesting explanation of why the shy are surprisingly drawn to performing arts, interpreting psychoanalyst Donald Kaplan's ideas about stage fright's consuming fear of letting go of the everyday mannerisms that most people cling to, that make us ourselves, concluding that this might have the opposite effect of fear on the shy: Perhaps shy people are drawn to the stage because they do not have this everyday poise, so they are looking to strike another pose that might work better for them.

But there were plenty of beautifully written and researched ideas that I found interesting and helpful. There's a lot to learn about shy people and especially yourself, if you consider yourself falling somewhere on the shy spectrum. The lens of others' experience is a good one to apply here, to see how others have managed their social difficulties or turned them into art.

For college I read Pat Barker's novel Regeneration, about the quickie mental rehabilitation attempts made on shellshocked trench soldiers of World War I, intending only to stabilize them mentally and return them to the trenches. I loved it and was always interested in its real-life figures, so a highlight of this book for me was seeing some of them pop up. Craiglockhart War Hospital's psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers was shy, and in treating poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, he advised, "If you can somehow prevent your shyness from clotting into neurotic risk aversion, it can help you face the world with an added layer of gentleness and curiosity." And to give you the time and energy to make art. As Moran writes, It is less a shrinking away from the world than a displacement or redirection of our energies.

For most of our lifetimes we've been told that being shy is a bad thing, there's a plethora of self-help books on how to correct this negative trait. It's refreshing then to read a book in support of the shy, showing it in a positive light, as a normal element of personality instead of a flaw to be overcome.

I loved this book. I could see myself being described in this book