JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL teaches English at Washington and Jefferson College and is the author or editor of six books. His work has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Nature, and Scientific American, among others.
An "insightful consideration of all things story."
--Library Journal "A lively pop-science overview of the reasons why
we tell stories and why storytelling will endure..[Gottschall's]
snapshots of the worlds of psychology, sleep research and virtual
reality are larded with sharp anecdotes and jargon-free summaries
of current research... Gottschall brings a light tough to knotty
psychological matters, and he's a fine storyteller himself."
--Kirkus Reviews "They say we spend multiple hours immersed in
stories every day. Very few of us pause to wonder why. Gottschall
lays bare this quirk of our species with deft touches, and he finds
that our love of stories is its own story, and one of the grandest
tales out there--the story of what it means to be human."
--Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales
of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic
Table of the Elements "Story is not the icing, it's the cake!
Gottschall eloquently tells you 'how come' in his well researched
new book."
--Peter Guber, CEO, Mandalay Entertainment and author of the #1 New
York Times bestseller, Tell To Win "This is a quite wonderful book.
It grips the reader with both stories and stories about the telling
of stories, then pulls it all together to explain why storytelling
is a fundamental human instinct."
-- Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor and Honorary
Curator in Entomology, Harvard University "The Storytelling Animal
is a delight to read. It's boundlessly interesting, filled with
great observations and clever insights about television, books,
movies, videogames, dreams, children, madness, evolution, morality,
love, and more. And it's beautifully written--fittingly enough,
Gottschall is himself a skilled storyteller."
--Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at Yale and author of How
Pleasure Works "Like the magnificent storytellers past and present
who furnish him here with examples and inspiration, Jonathan
Gottschall takes a timely and fascinating but possibly forbidding
subject -- the new brain science and what it can tell us about the
human story-making impulse -- and makes of it an extraordinary and
absorbing intellectual narrative. The scrupulous synthesis of art
and science here is masterful; the real-world stakes high; the
rewards for the reader numerous, exhilarating, mind-expanding."
--Terry Castle, Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities,
Stanford University --
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |