Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World

Combining anthropology, zoology and neuroscience, Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing, and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World attempts to explain the scientific underpinnings of the emotion that leads to prejudice, violence and genocide. The far-ranging if sometimes digressive book by journalist and science writer Rush Dozier Jr. (Fear Itself) uses plenty of present-day examples of racial, religious and political conflicts the Russians' war in Chechnya, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Oklahoma City bombing as a launching point for his explanations of how the primitive reptilian brain and the fight-or-flight response lie at the root of our cultural prejudices. (Sept.)