Daniel Nettle: 5 books

What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges...

What exactly is happiness? Can we measure it? Why are some people happy and others not? And is there a drug that could eliminate all unhappiness? People all over the world, and throughout the ages, have thought about happiness, argued about its nature, and, most of all, desired it. But why do we have...

Why are some people worriers, and others wanderers? Why do some people seem good at empathising, and others at controlling? We have something deep and consistent within us that determines the choices we make and the situations we bring about. But why should members of the same species differ so markedly...

Nettle’s book presents the results of five years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in two different neighbourhoods of the same British city, Newcastle upon Tyne. The neighbourhoods are only a few kilometres apart, yet whilst one is relatively affluent, the other is amongst the most economically...

Few people know that nearly one hundred native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, or that most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world's languages may die out in the next century. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine...