Greater Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life

As of this week, Greater Good Executive Editor Dacher Keltner's new book, Born to be Good, is available at your local bookstore. Here's what the publisher, WW Norton, has to say:

In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short"-we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies? By combining stories of scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy, Keltner illustrates his discussions with more than fifty photographs of human emotions. Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another.

Also forthcoming from Greater Good Science Center authors: The Daddy Shift, by Jeremy Adam Smith (Beacon, Spring 2009) and The Compassionate Instinct, which collects the best essays from Greater Good magazine (WW Norton, Fall 2009).