Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Psychology

HIGH CONFLICT

Amanda Ripley

Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out

High Conflict uses cutting-edge science and investigative reporting to explain the lure of malignant conflict in our private and public lives - and to reveal how we can escape it.

When we are baffled by the insanity of the other side, it usually means the conflict itself has taken over, exerting a power all its own. As Ripley shows, high conflict operates differently from regular conflict. Until now, no book has tried to explain why people get trapped into high conflict - from couples who spend decades in divorce court, to gang members fighting across several generations, to Israelis and Palestinians locked in an 80-year war. But Ripley shows that high conflict is a behavioral system that works the same in every place, and how some people have broken free.

High Conflict shows what it takes to short-circuit the feedback loops that lock people into perpetual showdowns. When that happens, conflict becomes necessary and good, instead of destructive. This is a book we need to help ourselves and each other during these polarized times. Books about polarization are usually about the politics that got us here. High Conflict goes deeper because it is about universal human instincts behind this moment in America and around the world, and will appeal to the exhausted majority of people who want out.

Amanda Ripley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable. She writes for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

Available products
Book Published 2021-04-06 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Amanda Ripley shows that the same minds that get us into bitter tribal battles can get us out of them. Via riveting stories in diverse settings - urban gangland, a war-torn central American nation, fractious municipal politics - Ripley proves that happy endings can happen in real life.

Rarely have I read a book as downright clairvoyant as High Conflict. While most of us were raging at the rage in our culture, Amanda Ripley composed a lucid, compulsively readable roadmap to a world in which we can live with one another again. Honestly, I'll never argue the same way again.

A brilliant book that reveals how poisonous showdowns work. But more than just highlighting the problems, Ripley's book also provides solutions. Equally valuable in our personal lives, as in navigating the polarized time we're living in.

The unforgettable stories in this book show how even people who disagree profoundly can still connect with one another and make progress. A book to give you confidence in the future.

Ripley brilliantly illuminates the forces driving us to build impenetrable walls between ourselves and differing others, as well as the forces empowering us to build bridges over those walls. The lessons couldn't be more captivating or timely.

Amanda Ripley has combined skilled reporting, deep research, and riveting storytelling into a stellar work about an urgent topic. She demonstrates the dangers of incessant, self-perpetuating vitriol. But she also shows us the solution - how to move beyond the binary, to listen for the hidden story, and to replace contempt with curiosity. At a moment when too many Americans are at each other's throats, this is the book our country needs.

Ripley takes us deep into 5 conflicts, combining a journalist's skills of storytelling with the latest social psychological research on how conflicts start, escalate, and end. Along the way we learn concepts and techniques that will make us all better at managing conflicts and making them productive. This is one of the most important books that will be published in 2021. The COVID vaccine will soon free humanity from a biological pandemic, and this book, if widely read, could free humanity from an equally deadly scourge - high conflict.