"An important book for troubling times." Rabbi Marvin Hier, Founder and Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance

"One of the most inspiring, and inspired, books...I thank the author for enriching my life, and the life of every reader, who will read this important work." Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA School of Law and author of The Place of Tolerance in Islam

"...the most terrible of all weapons of mass destruction lurks within our own primitive psyches and we must find a way to deactivate it." Rush W. Dozier Jr., from Why We Hate

We humans are the crown of creation, the top of the evolutionary heap, the most versatile (and most volatile) of nature's works. Equipped with brains of unprecedented size and complexity, we uniquely enjoy the capacities for foresight and planning, symbol making, and complex language use. We also are unique in our capacity for hatred.

The darkest of our emotions, hate shatters relationships, undermines communities, ruins lives, and saps the health of all who experience it. And when coupled with our extraordinary talent for fashioning tools of utmost precision and effectiveness, hate becomes the single most destructive power on Earth.

What is hate? Why does it so often lead to the most extreme forms of violence and cruelty? What is the unique quality of human beings that allows us to hate ourselves? How can hate be stopped? The first book to explore the science behind hatred, Why We Hate provides answers to these and other crucial questions about "the nuclear weapon of the mind."

Over the past decade, neuroscientists studying the brain have pieced together a picture of the biology of hate. In Why We Hate, Rush Dozier Jr., explores these findings and shows how they provide insights into how hate arises in an individual, a community, or a nation; how it effects human behavior; and how it has helped determine the course of history. He also combines those insights with extensive research in an array of disciplines, including anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cultural history, sociology, biology, and neuroscience to shed new light on war, genocide, terrorism, racism, love-hate relationships, the disease of self-hate, and other prevalent forms of hate.

With the dramatic, world-wide escalation of rampage killings, hate crimes, and ethnic purges, not to mention the looming specter nuclear terrorism, our very survival as a species depENDs on our ability to understand and come to terms with hate, our most pernicious evolutionary legacy. Why We Hate represents an important step in that direction.

"Why We Hate tells a fascinating story of how hatred arises in the human nervous system. Even more important, it tells us what we can do to prevent it. This book literally deals with our survival." Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the national bestseller Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

"Dozier offers a deep insight into the nature of hate, its scientific foundation, its role and effect in our society, and especially, how to suppress and eliminate it from the contemporary world." Li-Zhi Fang (Fang Lizhi), Professor of Physics, University of Arizona and exiled leader of the democracy movement in China

"A seamless narrative that is as gripping as it is intellectually illuminating. A tour de force that should be required reading for all of us." Solomon Snyder, M.D., Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, a world renowned neuroscientist

"Dozier courageously and empathetically confronts the most lethal disease that has plagued, and will continue to plague, human beings unless they unite in resisting its destructive force. Every teacher and parent should read it, and then recommEND it to her students and children. Even more, every politician and policy maker should read and absorb this book." Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA School of Law, authority on human rights and terrorism, and author of The Place of Tolerance in Islam

"A truly remarkable book. Dozier expertly delves into the biological basis of human hate­­and at the same time manages to propose serious, rational solutions for some of the greatest problems facing the human race." Mark Potok, editor of The Intelligence Report

Rush W. Dozier Jr. is a Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist and science writer.

2006-07-30 A total revelation