Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor at Cambridge University in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. He is also the Director of Cambridge's internationally-renowned Autism Research Centre. He has carried out research into social neuroscience over a career spanning twenty years. The Essential Difference (Penguin 2003) has been translated in over a dozen languages and put forward the theory of 'the extreme male brain'.
Bringing cruelty triumphantly into the realm of science, this
pioneering journey into human nature at last delivers us from
'evil'.
*Dr. Helena Cronin, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy of Natural
and Social Science, LSE*
A compelling and provocative account of empathy as our most
precious social resource. Lack of empathy lurks in the darkest
corners of human history and Simon Baron Cohen does not shrink from
looking at them under the fierce light of science.
*Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, UCL*
Simon Baron-Cohen combines his creative talent with evidence and
reason to make the case that evil is essentially a failure of
empathy. It is an understanding that can enlighten an old debate
and hold out the promise of new remedies.
*The Illusionist*
A book that gets to the heart of man's inhumanity to man...
Baron-Cohen has made a major contribution to our understanding of
autism
*Guardian*
Fascinating... bold
*Sunday Times*
Ground-breaking and important...This humane and immensely
sympathetic book calls us to the task of reinterpreting aberrant
human behaviour so that we might find ways of changing it for the
better...The effect...is not to diminish the concept of human evil,
but to demystify it
*Literary Review*
Fascinating and disturbing
*Sunday Telegraph*
Isn't it lucky...that the very people who can't put themselves into
other people's shoes, have a champion [in Simon Baron-Cohen] who,
by dint of his curiosity, has turned it into an art form?
*Scotsman*
Attractively humane...fascinating information about the relation
between degrees of empathy and the state of our brains.
*Financial Times*
Easy to read and packed with anecdotes. The author conveys brain
research with verve.
*Science Focus*
Zero Degrees of Empathy is short, clear, and highly readable.
Baron-Cohen guides you through his complex material as of you were
a student attending a course of lectures. There's no excuse for not
understanding anything he says... he is an outstandingly effective
communicator of serious science. His passionate optimism, his
belief that scientific study can deepen our humanity, lies at the
heart of his theorising
*The Spectator*
In a book that is partly a popular science treatise and partly a
self-help manual... he interweaves life stories and clinical
evidence in an engaging and informative manner... He is grappling
with one of the most important questions for our times
*Times Higher Education*
In his 2007 book Musicophilia, psychiatrist Oliver Sacks warned
that although neuroscience offers exciting insights, 'there is
always a certain danger that the simple art of observation may be
lost, that clinical description may become perfunctory, and the
richness of the human context ignored'. Simon Baron-Cohen, director
of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, UK, rises to the
challenge in his latest book by combining basic science and
clinical observation in an attempt to explain human cruelty... We
should take Baron-Cohen's accessible book as an invitation to leave
the comforts of smaller, more tractable problems in a genuine
attempt to address larger social issues
*Nature*
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