The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing Hardcover – September 11, 2018 by Merve Emre (Doubleday/ Random House Audio)

The book does contain some interesting tidbits and examples of the history of the MBTI. Otherwise, it is a classic example of "paradigm paralysis" from the first words. The author's biases are clear from the beginning and by the end, it's even clearer -- the author even admits her behavior is part of her "B#%##" personality which interestingly corresponds to a possible aspect of her type.

While the author lists extensive references at the end, the book is filled with comments and "interpretations" of many communications that leave me wondering "where's the evidence of this?" So many examples, including the author's interpretation of the thinking portrayed by a photograph -- a photograph where the expressions could be interpreted in many different ways.

The book wanders back and forth with a confusing timeline that had me frequently trying to figure out the when of a particular part of the story.

While statistical validity -- which others claim the book ignores in today's version of the MBTI -- has its place, the author fails to recognize "face validity." Participants of the MBTI today see the instrument as reflecting choices they make -- and they validate the results by the importance of "verifying" the results. The author's arrogance in sarcastically calling the MBTI a "test" during her prejudiced attendance at a certification session was just one of many statements that tarnished the book.An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter--fiction writers with no formal training in psychology--and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.

Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?