Peterson is fifty-five, and his delayed success should give hope to underappreciated academics everywhere. And he has learned to distill his wide-ranging theories into pithy sentences, including one that has become his de facto catchphrase, a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: “Sort yourself out, bucko.” His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Canada, a small town in Northern Alberta, and he has a fondness for quaint slang his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America. Lots of fans find him on YouTube, where he is an unusual sort of celebrity, a stern but mercurial lecturer who often holds forth for hours, mixing polemics with pep talks. Peterson, formerly an obscure professor, is now one of the most influential-and polarizing-public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. It’s called “ 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” and it has become an international blockbuster. Peterson, has produced a sequel, of sorts. “This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized.” But he expressed the hope that curious souls would nevertheless discover this curious book, and savor it “at leisure.”Įighteen years later, the author of “Maps of Meaning,” Jordan B. “Doing justice to this tome in a two-paragraph synopsis is impossible,” he concluded. The reviewer, a sympathetic professor of psychiatry, bravely attempted to explain such forbidding phrases as “the grammatical structure of transformational mythology.” Then he admitted defeat. The book, “ Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” was nearly six hundred pages long, and, although it was published by the academic press Routledge, it fit neatly within no scholarly discipline. In February, 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a concise review of a not-at-all-concise book. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

Books by jordan peterson