The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Gavin de Becker, the nation's leading expert on predicting violent behavior, proves that we are all qualified to answer life's highest-stakes questions. "True fear is a gift, " he says, because it is a survival signal that sounds only in the presence of danger; yet unwarranted fear has assumed a power over us that it holds over no other creature on earth. It need not be this way. In this book, de Becker shows that you can already predict violent behavior. Through dozens of compelling stories from his own career, he lays out the pieces of the human violence puzzle and shows how you can solve it by paying attention to the subtle - and sometimes blatant - signals of intuition. As he says, "You can refuse to be a victim." Filled with unique and surprising insights into human behavior, "The Gift of Fear" will help you separate real from imagined danger, give you confidence in a sometimes threatening world, and make your life measurably safer.