Book Review: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall

• Title: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
• Author: Jonathan Gottschall
• ISBN: 978-0-544-00234-0

When I picked this up, I thought it was a book about how to be a better storyteller. It’s not that. It’s a book about the science of storytelling. Though I went into it with incorrect expectations (entirely my fault), I still enjoyed it.

As you’d expect from a book about storytelling, it’s written in an engaging way. It’s impeccably researched, and the author masterfully weaves together those different threads to draw his conclusions.

Since finishing the book the other day, I regularly find myself noticing that the form all my internal dialogues take is a story. In fact, thanks to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve started seeing stories everywhere. I’ve already started to consider how I present stories in the various things I produce (presentations, books, etc).

So, while I didn’t get what I was expecting out of my time reading this book, I still think it was valuable and enjoyable time spent.