How Emotions Work

by Jack Katz

Many of the ways in which we express and react to emotions make very little sense. From the tears that mark both the best and worst moments in our lives to the rages sparked by the most trivial of traffic annoyances, emotions surprise us-they lead us to act in ways contrary to our better judgment, and they always seem to lie just beyond our control. In How Emotions Work , Jack Katz observes situations ranging from a criminal's interrogation-room breakdown to a child's temper tantrum, and offers new approaches to understanding our emotions, their sources, and the behavior they lead to, all with unprecedented clarity.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

407 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Jack Katz was an American comic book artist and writer, painter and art teacher known for his graphic novel The First Kingdom, a 24-issue epic he began during the era of underground comix.
Influenced by such illustrative comic-strip artists as Hal Foster and Alex Raymond, Katz attended the School of Industrial Art in New York City. He began working for comic-book publishers in the 1940s, during the period fans and historians call the Golden Age of Comic Books. Though continuing to work in comics through the 1950s, his slow pace and highly detailed, idiosyncratic art style prompted him to leave that field for 14 years. Circa 1969, he returned to mainstream color comics as well as to black-and-white horror-comics magazines, and after a move to California embarked upon The First Kingdom, a serialized work that later became considered a precursor to, or an early form of, the graphic novel. He completed it in 1986, and went on to write and draw further works in that vein, and to teach art.

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting take on emotion, thinking, and self