The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness

The award-winning bestseller that helped launch an international movement (and inspired the film "I Am"). Acclaimed author Marc Barasch brilliantly explores the nature and practice of compassion: What can we learn from exceptionally empathic people? Can we increase our compassion quotient? How do we open our hearts to those who do us harm? What if the great driving force of our evolution were actually survival of the kindest? Drawing on science and spirituality, history and popular culture, bottom-line business and a high-sense of fun, here is a startling, provocative argument that a simple shift in consciousness "can change pretty much everything." With a keen balance of hope and realism, Marc Barasch set out on a journey to the heart of compassion, discovering its power to change who we are and the society we might become. He describes his own encounters with primates who demonstrate the roots of human empathy, and with Buddhist monks whose brain scans show how the practice of kindness actually resculpts our neural pathways. He vividly profiles his moving encounters with a man who donated his kidney to a stranger, and a man who forgave his daughter's murderer; with teenage Palestinian and Israeli girls learning to wage peace; even with astronomers trying to devise a missive to E.T. that we humans are not only clever, but kind.