BARBARA OAKLEY Explorations in mind and place
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One of the nicest things I've learned is that it's possible to bring fresh perspectives to fascinating subjects by applying knowledge from many different disciplines. I think it's as important to use the latest breakthroughs from science as it is to use real world insights.
I've gotten my real world insights by working in lots of different places and doing very different things: serving as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers up in the Bering Sea, teaching in China, going from US Army private to Regular Army Captain, and working as a radio operator at the South Pole Station in the Antarctic. (I met my husband there—I had to go to the end of the earth to meet that man!) It's the common sense insights that help tell the story—and I love good stories. But beneath my stories sizzle facts. On Cold-Blooded Kindness: “Riveting and disturbing, an investigation into American-heartland pathos in which ‘guilt,’ ‘innocence,’ ‘victim,’ ‘perpetrator,’ come to seem almost hopelessly tangled. Barbara Oakley is to be commended for looking so hard and so closely at the motives, in some, that underlie acts of ‘kindness’ and ‘altruism’—suggesting that things are not always as they appear, and the phrase killed with kindness springs from the absolute bedrock of folk wisdom.” —Joyce Carol Oates, professor of the arts at Princeton University; recipient of the 1969 National Book Award for her novel them; Pulitzer Prize nominee for the novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde On Pathological Altruism “What a wonderful book! This is one of the few books in evolutionary biology I've read in the past ten years that taught me something completely new.” —Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Harvard University I blog sporadically as Scalliwag at Psychology Today. |
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