As I come to the end of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, one issue continually emerges. She never really assesses the theories that she writes about unless they've already been dismissed by psychology or psychiatry at large.
This apparent disinclination for passing judgment fits in with Cain's own introversion. The last thing she'd likely want to appear as is accusatory or confrontational. Yet, I can't help but wonder if her lack of deep analysis sells her own book short. I mean, a lot of research went into this book, and in her introduction Cain notes that much of that research wound up going into the extensive list of books for further reading that follows the main text. Merely presenting various theorists' ideas and not really engaging them beyond noting where the current establishment stands on them makes the whole experience of Quiet a bit shallow.
It also, as noted before, sets it very firmly in the "general audience" category of books. Accessibility is good, and listing books that go into further depths is great, but a little more analysis would have made Quiet more challenging. Instead, true to its subject matter, it just goes along with what the world of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology have to offer.
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