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Of Human Kindness by Paula Marantz Cohen
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Of Human Kindness

What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy

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Narrator Janet Metzger

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Length 4 hours 53 minutes
Language English
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While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.



Cohen takes listeners through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

Paula Marantz Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English and dean of the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. Her books include Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us about Empathy, Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, and the bestselling novel Jane Austen in Boca.

Bringing the experience of nearly four decades of theater, film, and television acting to audiobook narration, AudioFile Earphones Award winner Janet Metzger has deftly interpreted the many-faceted characters of Southern fiction writers such as Sarah Addison Allen, Patti Callahan Henry, and Kristy Woodson Harvey. As an award-winning documentary narrator and a master teacher at Emory University School of Law, where she teaches storytelling and persuasion, Janet brings both warmth and authority to nonfiction as well. Whether she is narrating a Southern romance, a heroine's journey, or an innovative take on business, Janet's warm and inviting voice will draw you into the story.

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Reviews

"While Metzger delivers the somewhat academic lectures in a carefully articulated manner, she dramatically performs the excerpts from Shakespeare's plays that illustrate the author's points." ---AudioFile Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting