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The definitive edition of Darwin's classic – a brilliantly entertaining and accessible exploration of human and animal behaviour, reissued to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Why do we bite people we feel affection towards? Why do dogs wag their tails? Or cats purr? Why do we get embarrassed, and why does embarrassment make us blush? These and many other questions about the emotional life of man and animals are answered in this remarkable book. Expression is the only book in which Darwin sketches out his revolutionary ideas about human behaviour in detail: he discusses childhood learning, insanity, painting and sculpture, animal behaviour and the differences in facial expression of the world's peoples.
Paul Ekman is Professor of Psychology (emeritus) at the Univesity of California Medical School, San Francisco. He is the author of Emotional Awareness (co-authored with the Dalai Lama) and Emotions Revealed. He is co-editor of Emotions Inside Out: 130 years After Darwin's Expression and Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage.
"Why do we shrug? Why do dogs wag their tails? Why do we scowl when angry and pout when sad rather than the other way around? What is the difference between guilt and shame? This would be an extraordinary book even if it had only answered these and scores of similar questions about the emotions in 1872. But Expression also proved that the human mind, not just the body, is a product of evolution. It showed, during the heyday of scientific racism, that the races of mankind are fundamentally similar; anticipating virtually every twentieth-century behavioral science [...] Darwin enriched his arguments with hundreds of insightful observations, many with the pathos and humor of great literature, as when he describes the terror of a man being led to his execution or the comical dejection of his dog as soon as it sensed that a walk might end [...] This edition has the feel not of a lovingly restored museum piece but of a recent seminal work."
– Steven Pinker, Science
"Darwin's most readable and human book [...] It was never republished in his lifetime, even though Darwin made many additions and revisions in the text. Only now have all of Darwin's changes been incorporated into the book, along with a full apparatus of notes and appendices and a number of photographs that never made it into the 1873 edition [...] This new comprehensive edition of Expression will introduce a new generation of readers to Darwin's masterpiece, undiminished and intensely relevant even 125 years after publication."
– Oliver Sacks
"The Expression of the Emotions predates Freud, and it will still be illuminating human psychology long after Freud's discrediting is complete."
– Richard Dawkins
"Highly original [...] this is scholarship at its best."
– Simon Baron-Cohen, Nature
"Ekman's edition is no mere reprint plus introduction."
– Mark Ridley, Scientific American
