Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

2.5"glib, over-reaching, yet still worthwhile" stars !!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and Perseus books for an e-copy. This was released November 2021. I am providing my honest review.

I want to describe to you how this book went down for me. It is an alumni continuing ed lecture that you are sort of interested in attending but you already know how it will go down. The lecturer has accolades coming out of his ying yang and in the audience will be the semi intelligent left leaning liberals that are financially comfortable oooohing and aaaahing and nodding their heads in agreement while sipping their Chablis but only half listening as they are exhausted from their mid management careers and would rather be Skyping with their extramarital affair. The audience is multicultural and very very woke but they are envious of their former classmates' larger homes and are distressed by the possibility of a mens' shelter being built two streets down.....do you get my drift...that is the narrative that came up for me during this read....

This is not an academic book but a presentation of strongly held beliefs held about the intersectionality of our human need for narrative, increasing isolation and the increasing influence of social media in our lives tied together by an entertaining array of soft science research, anecdotes and humor that only ladies with three glasses of wine would giggle at....


I am not saying that this did not open up ideas for me or I did not enjoy to a degree but the authorial voice and lack of organization led to this being a rather ho hum evening.

With a lot of work this could have been much more impactful and helpful...which I believe is what the author intended....

This is my story and I'm sticking to it....

This is a well written easy read. It’s not academic although there is a lot of research referred to within. The story includes philosophy, psychology, politics, new media, old media, history. It touches on many disciplines to reach the conclusion that we need to be careful.

Society exists through ‘story’, we all tell stories every day and listen to stories every day. Mr Gottschall suggests we need to pay attention to where those stories develop and who is in charge of conceiving them. There are many ways stories can be used for good and bad and the author is suggesting we should not just accept what we’re being told.

I found the book fascinating with a light touch and lots to think about. Recommended if you’re looking for a different slant on how we can control what we believe.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley

“Plato didn’t write The Republic for us. I doubt he imagined that young philosophy students would still be slogging their way through his work on its twenty-fourth centennial” says Jonathan Gottschall, author of ‘The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down’.

In a time when facts grow weaker and stories grow stronger, this is a book about the stories in our heads and to be suspicious of them and that’s not easy. Storytelling is a necessary part of humanity, we can’t live without them, but technology is amplifying their power and causing chaos.

Plato warned us about storytelling, they work their way into our minds and societies. Never trust a storyteller? But we are all storytellers because it’s better than reality and so we shouldn’t trust ourselves unless we learn to become controllers of the stories in our heads.

Gottschall calls on researchers to develop this infant subject, the science of storytelling.

Facts are increasingly useless in bridging communication gaps. And empathy appears to be sliding from interpersonal engagement. So many of us look to the power of stories to make better connections.
In stories, we find hope and redemption. The notion that better stories can do the work of facts when it comes to convincing difficult people is not only tempting, but it feels right. After all, stories connect with us in a more personal way than, say, the Periodic Table. Stories make us more empathetic. They are emotionally redemptive.
Or so we’d like to believe.
The Story Paradox opens with the author, Jonathan Gottschall enjoying a tall bourbon at a bar, observing the patrons and making notes when he is struck by the truth of his story.
Not the thesis, which by that time must have been well established and the research near completed, but the truth that he had happened upon during that work. It came like a flash, the way all solutions to riddles do, not so much the final answer, but the way forward that will unlock the puzzle.
Faced with the truth of The Story Paradox, a lesser person might have decided to keep drinking. Instead, Gottschall wrote the word, “Sway” on the napkin he’d been using for notes and went on to produce as insightful a work on our culture as we have any right to expect.
The nonfiction book clips along like a thriller, drawing the reader in even as they know they very well may be the villain rather than the protagonist. This makes the book’s point all the more compelling if deeply disturbing.
The premise is simple, we are storytelling beings compelled more by narrative than almost any other stimulus. When we communicate we want people to accept us, to be swayed closer to our worldview than to somebody else’s.
In subtle ways we’re trying to build alliances among and between our small social circles and nothing penetrates better than a story people connect with.
The first of my own stories the book called to mind was the time I realized the Woody Guthrie song “Pretty Boy Floyd” was based on a bald-faced lie. The song portrays the brutish gangster as a Robinhood figure, driven to crime by a brutal lawman who insulted his wife.
It is a complete fabrication, but in its telling Woody gets to sing the iconic lines: “Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen” and “You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.”
The point of the story wasn’t to whitewash a murderer so much as to indict the real enemies, the East Coast bankers and the greed they engender. The unfortunate plot device was to establish an alternative origin story for a notorious killer.
To say Floyd was motivated by the same craven instincts as the bankers would undermine the narrative, so Guthrie chose to lie. Of course, you can’t really “lie” in a story. The story is the story, and that is where things can get a little tricky.
Even though it made sense then as it does now to wonder whether the bigger crimes are the legal ones, it was one of the first times I understood Plato’s motivation to argue that poetry should be abolished.
If doing away with poetry isn’t the most shocking aspect of his plan for a totalitarian utopia in The Republic, it is right up there with eugenics and holding women and children in common.
They are shocking claims from a person we want to say was enlightened, but now as we face another long winter and possibly a new culture of disease, the notion of shutting up liars seems much more appealing than it did in, say, 2015.
Plato understood the power stories held, which is why his own work was in story rather than in treatise form. But he also understood that stories can degrade as well as enhance human perspective.
As with the notion of “Sway” it is a problem Gottschall returns to regularly, biting off a piece and chewing over it with care before advancing the main idea. More importantly, it was how he swayed me as a reader.
The promise of The Republic, this notion that only people committed to advancing the ideal state should be allowed to run it, is so enticing until you consider the dark side.
What bothers Plato, and Gottschall (and me) is that narrative bypasses reason. As belief becomes the hammer under which reality shatters, it seems clearer that we don’t need one more fact. I’ve come to think of facts as pool noodles that people bonk one another with. What we require is empathy, or that was my glib perception before.
Gottschall asks a simple question ostensibly about literature that does some real damage to the notion that boosting empathy is some sort of magic bullet:
How do we cultivate empathy in fictional characters?
In almost every case, we spark empathy with a character when we see their narrative conflict as our own. The protagonist and the anti-hero alike need a villain against whom to strive. It is their striving against the “them” that stirs our empathy. Villains are flat characters by definition. They don’t require our empathy, only our righteous schadenfreude at their inevitable comeuppance.
While Gottschall feints toward the discussion of whether or not free will is real before (wisely) abandoning it as secondary as well as a little too divisive, he uses the mention to make a larger point villain.
While it is pleasant to think that we, being morally superior, would have resisted being Nazis if we were born German in the 1930s, the hard truth is almost all of us would have not only gone along but done it with the moral certainty with which we condemn them today.
In other words, “There but for the grace of God go I” is something we might not take seriously enough.
The thing is, the storyteller decides who the villains are, and the better they are at it, the more compelling their story. From there, it isn’t too great a leap to realize that we want to be on the storyteller’s side.
We want to believe as they do, and when they fail to come through we take it as a personal affront. Either way, we’re invested in every story and to that end allow our emotions (and through them, our worldview) to be manipulated.
“We’d like to think persuasion could be reliably accomplished simply by producing better and truer information. But persuasion isn’t the same as instruction — as taking a blank slate and filling it up,” Gottschall writes.
Throughout the work, Gottschall recounts stories and tears them apart from multiple perspectives to bring us along. The stories are from almost every political and ethical perspective.
In turning them inside out he doesn’t undo them so much as hold them up to the cold light of their own reason, which is way worse, or at least more revealing.
When he recounts the January 6 insurrection from the perspective of the people who genuinely believed they were saving their country from an unfair and illegal election, there is no snark or hyperbole.
The hardest thing to accept is that people really believe. It is so much easier to dismiss them as kooks or idiots than to imagine they truly accept a story counter to our own.
“Our own” is another problem from which Gottschall refuses to retreat. This isn’t a great time to be a conservative in academics. He provides numbers to back up the intuitive fact that college professors skew far more liberal than can provide for a rounded worldview.
Worse, liberal centrists may also be a dying breed as the kind of radical questions a person can investigate on-campus — questions about race and gender — drift toward taboo while moral certainty grips the left in a way liberals like to pretend can only happen on the religious right.
“The more consensus reality dissolves, the more we’re living in a de facto storyland,” Gottschall writes.
What makes The Story Paradox so compelling is that, rather than provide you facts upon which to skewer your intellectual opposites, it is a challenge for us all to review our own stories and the way we tell them.
It’s a challenge that has nothing to do with political bent so much as with the reader’s belief in the power of stories, and whoever approaches it honestly may be sadder and wiser, but hopefully not too much so.
The problem isn’t intractable, but it’s not a simple fix. Mass cultural change rarely is. Historically speaking totalitarianism tends to win out. It is the most effective, adopted form of government in the history of our species.
The challenge is to figure out how much we’re willing to change our own beliefs and approaches to narrative and through it, interpersonal relationships.
The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down from Basic Books Press is available for pre-order now and will go on sale in November.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter here.

Today stories seem more important than facts. In fact, people that tell and write stories, especially in the media, focus so much on the narrative that people that suffer and wrongly treated become just characters and not real, flesh and bones. The news gets diluted even more in social media. We have hashtags and cancelations. The suffering takes a back seat.
This book offers a few examples to make us understand how the idea of storytelling that helped us understand and connect to our past may become our doom. I would have loved a little more clarity.

Now more than ever, we find ourselves consuming and being bombarded by stories from ever angle-and reading this book reminded me of the power of narrative.
In social media today it's more about the power of a hashtag or trend- and once everyone is talking about it, it's difficult to take time to sieve through the truth from the lies. This book looks at the story, the oldest form of communication of human beings, takes us back to history and historical events to best understand how the one thing we love and are good at can ultimately destroy us.
As a Reader and Writer, this book is a great conversation to have. The author does not immediately say "watch what you say" or "sieve what you hear," he takes you through the journey of stories and story telling and misconceptions of them as well.
Thanks Netgalley for the eARC.