Human Goodness

In his many best-selling books, Yi-Fu Tuan seizes big, metaphysical issues and considers them in uniquely accessible ways. Human Goodness is evidence of this talent and is both as simple, and as epic, as it sounds. Genuinely good people and their actions, Tuan contends, are far from boring, naive, and trite; they are complex, varied, and enormously exciting.

Publishers Weekly

What unites Mandela, Mother Teresa, Mozart and Keats? According to philosopher Tuan (The Good Life), it's not genius or even fame-it's that they were all preternaturally good people. Refuting the notion that " 'good' is monotonously alike, whereas 'bad' or evil is endlessly colorful and various," this remarkable book delights in the varieties and contradictions in goodness. Tuan examines what motivates kindness with an assortment of brief biographies, vignettes and examples from literature. Heroes of goodness are surprisingly often scientists and intellectuals-Schweitzer or Socrates-as fulfilling one's intellectual and physical potential is an essential component of Tuan's understanding of good behavior. As the age-old question goes: are humans naturally good or evil? Tuan finds them to be naturally empty, with the best choosing to fill that emptiness with what is most generous, grateful, vital and sensuous. In evaluating goodness, Tuan asks a simple question: "In his or her presence, does one feel oneself a better and more intelligent human being?" One might argue that readers will feel better and more intelligent for having read about these lives well-lived. (May)

Yi-Fu Tuan is the author of more than two dozen critically acclaimed books, including Space and Place, Topophilia, Escapism, Coming Home to China, and Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. His previous books published by the University of Wisconsin Press are The Good Life, Morality and Imagination, and the autobiography Who Am I? Tuan is theJ. K. Wright and Vilas Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has been honored with the Cullum Medal of the American Geographical Society, the Lauréat d'Honneur of the International Geographical Union, and the Charles Homer Haskins Lectureship of the American Council of Learned Societies.