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Such opposition stretches back well over 100 years, to the turn-of-the-century New York of the Flatiron Building and Beaux Arts wonders like Penn Station, a building, The New York Times writes, that “once made travelers feel important.” In decades past, they fought the faceless towers that rose into the atmosphere and blocked the sun. Now, artists, urbanists, and architects protest faceless condos and big box stores. Its strata of public works projects, cultural institutions, department stores, hotels, hostels, housing, and skyscraping office buildings tell the story of its evolution.

This goes for the city’s architecture as much as for its population. Maybe not directly, but Peterson hands us tools to try to navigate and overcome the chaos (even mentioned in the book’s title) inside of us but also to make out the meaning of the outside world as well.New York is never just one city it’s always several, interacting with – or pushing out – each other. Most importantly, many critics view it as an unusual piece of work, but definitely in a good way unlike many other pseudo psychological books, this is not a ready-made list of quick fix actions and simplified, common ideas, but more food for thought, it showers us with ideas to reflect upon our human traits and ways of being which we may find surprisingly accurate.

There are many ways to describe the book: amusing, surprising, informative, intriguing, at times even infuriating, but altogether definitely unputdownable. It also includes real-life stories and author’s own confessions which makes it a very personal piece of work. To support his views, he uses many examples both from his academia, professional studies but also personal, day-to-day life and experience. Amongst the twelve timeless values is the importance of a simpler, organized, orderly world the need to always be honest and truthful not only to oneself but also to others making use of traditional, ancient wisdom individual responsibility within society, just to name a few. It is important to note that the book uses interdisciplinary evidence and touches upon numerous different topics like psychology, science and neuroscience, history, biology, literature and religion, which altogether adds to the great value of the work as it unveils the undisputed links and strong connections between all these disciplines.