Quiet seems to want to claim a piece of “...the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year...” and lands firmly in the self-justification section. The anecdotes typically reinforce this dim view. Rather than appealing in a Mlodinowian style that provide a personal connection to the the underlying facts, many vignettes are simply synecdoche in the guise of specificity:

The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college, She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.

It’s not that the story of Ms. Liao isn’t compelling, it’s that she is meant to stand in for “Introverts” with a capital “i”. It reaches too far. That is what made so many sections of this book a complete slog; granular anecdotes are wedged into a framework that is then extended beyond their incredibly narrow scope.

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