The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy Is Essential in Everyday Life

by Brian Goldman

Overview

As a veteran emergency room physician, Dr. Brian Goldman has a successful career setting broken bones, curing pneumonia, and otherwise pulling people back from the brink of medical emergency. He always believed that caring came naturally to physicians. But time, stress, errors, and heavy expectations left him wondering if he might not be the same caring doctor he thought he was at the beginning of his career. He wondered what kindness truly looks like—in himself and in others.

In The Power of Kindness, Goldman leaves the comfortable, familiar surroundings of the hospital in search of his own lost compassion. A top neuroscientist performs an MRI scan of his brain to see if he is hard-wired for empathy. A researcher at Western University in Ontario tests his personality and makes a startling discovery. Goldman then circles the planet in search of the most empathic people alive, to hear their stories and learn their secrets. He visits a boulevard in São Paulo, Brazil, where he meets a woman who calls a homeless poet her soulmate and reunited him with his family; a research lab in Kyoto, Japan, where he meets a lifelike, empathetic android; and a nursing home in rural Pennsylvania, where he meets a therapist at a nursing home who has an uncanny knack of knowing what’s inside the hearts and minds of people with dementia, as well as her protege, a woman who talked a gun-wielding robber into walking away from his crime. Powerful and engaging, The Power of Kindness takes us far from the theatre of medicine and into the world at large, and investigates why kindness is so vital to our existence.

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781443451062
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN is an ER doctor and a bestselling author. His CBC Radio show and podcast, White Coat, Black Art, has been on the air for over a decade. A sought-after speaker, he is also the host of The Dose, a new CBC podcast about personal health. Brian Goldman lives in Toronto with his family.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 A Question of Kindness 1

Chapter 2 Hard-wired 15

Chapter 3 Psychopaths, Narcissists, and Machiavellians-The Dark Triad 37

Chapter 4 The Donut Shop 65

Chapter 5 The Bar at Ground Zero 97

Chapter 6 Games of Empathy 127

Chapter 7 Homeless in Brazil 157

Chapter 8 The Kindest Robots 187

Chapter 9 Teach Me 233

Chapter 10 Soul Whisperers 255

Chapter 11 Epiphany 285

Acknowledgements 299

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

Amazing . . . such a brilliant read.” — Dina Pugliese, Citytv’s Breakfast Television

“Full of the wisdom [Goldman] learned and contains some of the inspiring stories of the most empathetic people he met on his journey.” — Global Morning

“A consummate storyteller with a smooth, accessible style.” — Winnipeg Free Press

From the Publisher

Amazing . . . such a brilliant read.

Dina Pugliese

A consummate storyteller with a smooth, accessible style.

Winnipeg Free Press

Full of the wisdom [Goldman] learned and contains some of the inspiring stories of the most empathetic people he met on his journey.

Global Morning