The Ten Types of Human

Reviews

Dexter Dias is on the side of the angels, who turn out to be us, the people. He writes like an angel too. Uplifting and indispensable. In defining and describing his human types, he draws on lab experiments, the animal kingdom, and all the literature you might expect from a modern behaviourist. Yet the main body of the book, the bits that transfixed and stayed with me, stopped me sleeping but got me up in the morning, were the human stories that Dias has travelled the world to find. His interviewees are always people, the most vivid flesh and blood, never case studies. And yet that’s not what’s so extraordinary about it: storytellers are rare, but not vanishingly so... Dias’s work as a human rights lawyer gives him this instinctive, urgent belief that all injustices, all catastrophes, exploitations, acts of violence, all human misery can be taken on and overcome, somehow, if the right people try and there are enough of them. His combination of rigour, idealism and pragmatism makes fertile terrain out of the most appalling battlefields... I emerged from this book feeling better about almost everything. The ideas in The Ten Types of Human are a layperson’s opening into a fascinating academic field: but more than that, a mosaic of faces building into this extraordinary portrait of our species. The Ten Types of Human is a fantastic piece of non-fiction, mixing astonishing real-life cases with the latest scientific research to provide a guide to who we really are. It’s inspiring and essential. This book is the one. Dexter Dias has written a game changer. Think Sapiens and triple it. Expand reviews