Rating: 
Summary: emotional intelligence is IQ tempered with maturity
Review: This book reviews how people need to be educated not just
intellectually with facts and figures, but emotionally. People
so often have problems in life solely due to the fact
that they haven't learned to get in touch with their feelings
or their fellow man's feelings. This book emphasizes how
children who are taught to respect other people not based on
the old adage of right and wrong, but of understanding why
it is right and wrong.
Learning compassion is a step to peacemaking. Learning to control or maintain certain emotions, rather than having them
control you is certainly a great asset in breaking patterns
and repeating mistakes.
Rating:
Summary: How dumb are you?
Review: Do you blow your top like the steam-driven trains of old? Do
you feel pity for someone who trips and falls flat on his face or do you laugh your head off? Are you the life of the
party or does everyone try to avoid you like the plague?
These and many other intriguing questions of the sort will
not be answered by this book. However, you'll get an idea
about why such questions do matter in life. Everyone goes
through life assuming he or she is intelligent, that is,
until someone else proves otherwise. In this amazing work,
the author succeeds in making you realize just how dumb you
are. Hold your horses! He doesn't consider himself the nerd
of the universe. Rather, he points out that there's such a
thing as an intelligence of the emotions. Being an intellectual
doesn't necessarily mean that you're intelligent emotionally.
Why bother about being so? So many things in life depend on
it. He makes you aware that your emotional stupidity is due
to your parents. While that can't be undone, at least you
can look forward to not committing the same mistakes. Take my
word for it: it's worth the time reading.
Rating:
Summary: Brainy is not bright
Review: As a very brainy boy and young man in school and college I thought my future would be bright; FALSE, it came to be mediocre. Why? Because I wasn't emotionally intelligent. After reading this book my life is improving rapidly. I highly recommend it
Rating:
Summary: Being Book-Smart Does Not Translate to Success!
Review: Being intellectually smart is surely a strong advantage in our society, but it doesn't say nearly as much as your control and awareness over your own emotions. Have you ever wondered why you have emotions, how your brain works to process them, and how you can use them to your own advantage? Can you control your impulsive desire to have instant gratification in order to work toward a more worthwhile long-term goal? Have you ever wondered what exactly causes your own innocent child to somehow grow up to be a rapist or a sociopath? Regardless of your lifestyle, whether you're a career person, a homemaker, a young college student, or a retired senior citizen, this book offers you an enormous variety of invaluable, fact-based information which is sure to help you with your relationships, your family, your career, and most important, knowing yourself. It is the critical education that everybody needs, yet virtually nobody receives in any formal way
Rating:
Summary: A book that could change our lives, our children, our world!
Review: Goleman provides information essential for anyone with children, who teaches children, who knows children, and for those who wish to understand themselves better.
The information presented in this book clearly illustrates that intelligience goes far beyond what society has always presented in the terms of "IQ" and shows that a realistic matter of determining what intelligience truly is depends on the ability to understand, acknowledge, and use social and emotional skills. As an educator
and psychotherapist, I feel this book is outstanding and can be used on all levels, from beginners to advanced practioners, as a guide in understanding our emotional and social states and to provide our children with the skills required to succeed in life and perhaps change the world. What we have always considered as "intelligience"
still remains to be important, but we must know that there is much more to it and Goleman gives us a book to provide us with a starting point. It is a must read!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Important traits other than IQ that promote success in life
Review: This book is not just for professionals. It is clearly written with many interesting real-life examples of traits other than IQ that help people to be successful in relationships and occupations, and how parents can foster those traits in their children. If you read The Bell Curve, you should read Emotional Intelligence for a more balanced view. Essential reading for parents, teachers, and anyone interested in human nature
Rating: 
Summary: Must reading if you are interested in the future of the human race
Review: This a book which makes clear the suddenly obvious central truth of being human -- we are emotional creatures first and last.Suddenly, it seems obvious that how we deal with this fact is -- after all is said and done-- the sole determiner of the quality of our lives. However, Goleman also brings together an authoritative array of research which "connects up the dots" of many separate fields of science. The picture of our selves and our society which emerges makes plain what, somehow, was not -- we need to learn what emotions are, how they work, and what skills we lack, and what those skills can accomplish. I think it is fair to say that there is no one who could not learn something seminal from this book, and those who deal with society -- educators and lawyers -- yes, lawyers -- should lead the pack in reading it. Thirty-three weeks on the best seller list says that we are hungry for this information. Thank you, Daniel Goleman
Rating:
Summary: Significant topic, questionable presentation
Review: The importance of emotional intelligence was proven to me early on in this book, especially with the author's neurological explanations of the brain. Daniel Coleman used a variety of approaches to prove the importance of emotional intelligence including: neuroscience, biology, and case studies. Yet, some of the directions the author chose to take lost my interest. The case studies could have been abbreviated and maybe the classification of emotions could have been expanded on. The book demonstrated the dire consequences of not learning emotional intelligence and sometimes used extreme examples which seemed unnecessary. However, this pioneering book (albeit somewhat outdated) deserves attention. For me the book started well with references to Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," making a connection between the wisdom that Aristotle exalted and emotional intelligence. The book went on to explain how the physical components of the brain affect emotional behavior; here the amygdala is explained, which is the control center for emotional behavior, and is referred to throughout the book. This biology and neuroscience clarified how rudimentary emotional behavior is in the human brain. In part three, the author showed progressive thinking in his belief that the medical profession must consider emotional factors. Since the book's publication, medical schools have agreed with him. On June 10, 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that graduates from all 126 medical schools in the U.S. will take a standardized test that will rate "bedside manner." According to the article, this test will "gauge what multiple-choice questions cannot: a graduate's ability to communicate with patients..." In parts Four and Five my interest waned as the author discussed how emotional training can save society. Although the author suggests key improvements to pedagogy, the case studies and extreme examples of what can go wrong with the emotional brain belabored the topic for me. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is closely analyzed, as is trauma, abuse, and bullies - all valid areas for discussion but beyond what is needed for demonstrating what emotional intelligence is and why it is important. Violence, social aggression, and certain neuroses resulting from emotional problems could have been explained in a shorter section. But the author deserves credit for offering solutions, and has an interesting theory that modernity is the cause for a worldwide trend of melancholy. I would have liked more of the book devoted to the challenge of defining emotions. Of interest to me was Appendix A because it revealed the classification attempts made for emotions. The section considers a handful of "core" emotions with all other emotions being a blend of these; there also might be families of emotions with many nuances affecting moods and temperament. This book reveals a big-picture outlook of the human brain and the emotional activity that is an intrinsic part of it. The thesis that emotional intelligence can be more important than IQ is well supported, but the author is not saying that it is necessarily better! (Previous reviewers of the book have created an EQ-versus-IQ contest.) Both are critical facets of intelligence that must work together and neither can be dismissed.
Rating: 
Summary: Contentious, But Interesting and Provocative on Emotions
Review: Daniel Goleman is to be congratulated for raising the general reader's awareness of the importance that emotions play in our personal and social lives back in 1995. Prior to 1995, I don't know of any book addressed to the layperson that explicated these matters as well as he did with the information he had at his disposal. That said, I had many problems with Goleman's exposition. First, it is not altogether certain nor important, as he insists, that the brain's amygdala is the locus of all emotions, a highly disputatious claim. Secondly, he never quite comes to define what an emotion is other than a "feeling," which is hardly revelatory or insightful. Are they cognitive judgments of value, or are they something the amygdala emotes separate and distinct from ratiocination, or are they the passions separate from ratiocination (which seems to be the case)? By comparison, Martha Nussbaum in "Upheavals of Thought" is far more explicative of what an emotion is, how it develops, and each emotion functions - both healthily and destructively.
He does, however, explain a variety of emotions function and how they help a person either function or dysfunction in both their personal and social domains, and for this alone, the book is helpful. His project is (1) to make the reader self-aware of his emotions; (2) help the reader understand what it means to be engulfed by them; (3) accepting of emotions, especially those that reward the self and others. This strategy is part of his "know thyself"and is fundamental to his project of developing emotional intelligence. He also makes the reader aware that too much attention has been spent on ratiocinative development at the expense of emotional development; whereas they ought to go hand in hand. He cites a number of very good and helpful examples.
Subjects covered (but by no means exhaustive) include impulse control, the cost of misattunement, passionate versus indifference, empathy, represssion, and other emotional factors that either facilitate or debilitate the individual in leading healthy lives. In many instances, he shows the reader why one emotions can be destructive, while another instance on how "reprogramming" the mind can make the emotions beneficial rather than destructive. Given that other books on the market are either more exhaustive and/or more directly helpful, I can't recommend this book other than for its perusal value. For someone who wants a detailed analysis of the emotions, I recommend Nussbaum's tome (supra.); for someone who wants to get control over their emotions, I recommend Elliot Cohen's "What Would Aristotle Do?"
Rating: 
Summary: Missing the Point
Review: In emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman attempts to find solutions for problems he doesn't understand the basic root causes of. He believes the difficulties we are facing today, such as children's misbehavior, teen violence, and an ever increasing divorce rate, are due to the rapid change in society and the slow pace of evolution. According to him our brains aren't yet developed enough to handle the pressures we face and the knowledge we have obtained. Our moral decline is due to chemical imbalances and inherited genes. He makes it very clear throughout the book that he believes, given the "facts", it is the responsibility of public schools to step in at an early age and train children in morals and ethics since many parents aren't doing it right at home. He focuses on programs that teach relying on self and, except for a few outside quotes, dismisses faith in God as a possible solution. He is wrong.
The problems we have today are a direct result of the environment we have created through selfish choices and sinful desires and they all began with the notion that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Therefore, there are no set boundaries for which our children can rely on to guide them through life. There isn't one true God, but many, just pick one that makes you feel good or none at all, every option is equal. We have destroyed the family. Not only have we made breaking up the family easy and acceptable through "no fault" divorce, but we have redefined the family to include any combination that feels right to the people involved no matter how degenerate. We have become a society of excuses where violent crimes are no longer due to evil but to some childhood trauma or chemical imbalance. Through millions of abortions, the sacrificing of embryos for stem cell research, and the popularity of preaching the benefits of euthanasia, we have created an environment where life is no longer valued. Our children are constantly being sent mixed messages such as don't have sex, but if you do it's okay as long as you use a condom and stand up for what you believe in but if you speak out against homosexuality it's hate speech. Children are taught that there is no place in school for God, only the scientific facts that the teacher decides are accurate. The Theory of Evolution reduces our children to accidents of nature that ultimately will not be held accountable for their actions since they are merely animals evolved to a higher state. Liberal education has raised us to believe the strict child rearing of the past is obsolete and that children are our equals. Parents have become their children's buddy rather than their disciplinarian. Through feminist teaching, the traditional roles of men and women, in which we were created to fulfill, have been made to look wrong and outdated; therefore our children grow up in daycare learning how to live life by a stranger instead of in a secure home environment. Is it any wonder why our children are confused and we are losing control?
As a Christian parent with kids in public school, this book is offensive. Goleman's book is not objective but anti-religion propaganda. His lack of belief in God as a legitimate option for fixing today's problems is apparent throughout the entire book. The only science sited is that which reflects his belief system, whether it has been disproved in other studies or not. His true feelings are explicitly displayed in Appendix B where he describes religion as "logic of the heart" along with poetry, psychosis, children, dreams, and myths. He also considers Buddha, a man who abandoned his wife and son to selfishly seek enlightenment without God, equal to Jesus, the sinless Son of God that died for our sins and was resurrected so that our souls could be saved not through ourselves but through forgiveness. I am teaching my children that they do not have to rely on themselves or the latest self help program to get them through life. They can rely on God no matter what the situation. They are never alone and always have someone to turn to. They are being taught proven science that upholds creation and dismisses evolution as fraudulant. Further more, they are being taught that there is absolute truth and that the definition of right and wrong is clear in the Ten Commandments and does not change due to personal opinion or frequently used excuses. I would hope that I could send my children to school to learn English and Math without having to worry about whether their fundamental belief system of relying on God and not themselves, was being torn down by educators that, though are probably well meaning, are dangerously in error and stepping far beyond their bounds.
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