Shrinking Violets, Joe Moran
Shrinking Violets, Joe Moran
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Shrinking Violets
The Secret Life of Shyness

Author: Joe Moran

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 8 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/21/2017


Synopsis

Shyness is a pervasive human trait: even most extroverts know what it is like to stand tongue-tied at the fringe of an unfamiliar group or flush with embarrassment at being the unwelcome center of attention. And yet the cultural history of shyness has remained largely unwritten—until now.

With incisiveness, passion, and humor, Joe Moran offers an eclectic and original exploration of what it means to be a "shrinking violet." Along the way, he provides a collective biography of shyness through portraits of such shy individuals as Charles Darwin, Charles Schulz, Garrison Keillor, and Agatha Christie, among many others. In their stories often both heartbreaking and inspiring and through the myriad ways scientists and thinkers have tried to explain and "cure" shyness, Moran finds hope. To be shy, he decides, is not simply a burden; it is also a gift, a different way of seeing the world that can be both enriching and inspiring.

About Joe Moran

Joe Moran is a professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University. His books include On Roads: A Hidden History, which was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Queuing for Beginners. He lives in Liverpool, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter

"I am the son and the heir/Of a shyness that is criminally vulgar" Being a shy person myself, I was drawn to the subject of this book. In an entertaining study, Joe Moran traces the origins of shyness throughout history, an issue which has afflicted a surprising number of high-achieving cultural figu......more

Goodreads review by Kate

I’m a little disappointed in this book. It’s full of anecdotes and observations but I don’t feel I’m any further forward in understanding what shyness is. The vignettes chosen by the author seem to conflate introversion, social anxiety, autism, mental illness, rebellion and plain eccentricity. He sa......more

Goodreads review by Murray

Moran’s book is “a field guide, a collective biography and a necessarily elliptical history of the shy”. It’s something of a wander through a series of lives lived with that “multilayered and unsummarisable condition”, “the sense of an emotional life both bottled up and brimming over”, and takes in......more

Goodreads review by Bernard

Not really a field guide at all, just a rambling collection of anecdotes about shy people through the ages. Some nice stories though.......more