On Kindness

"In this brilliant book, [authors] examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Modern people have been taught to perceive ourselves as fundamentally antagonistic to one another, our motives self-seeking. Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this book explains how and why we have chosen loneliness over connection. On Kindess argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live."--Book jacket.