Steven Pinker

I love and loathe this book all at once. It speaks very powerfully to much of what I feel, and then sometimes seems to get things so staggeringly, simplistically wrong that I want to shout my opinions in the town square.

It will be a while before I can write an even-handed review on this one.

My favorite part was when Pinker used big data and graphs to explain his arguments (even though they all seemed to be taken from the same source, and half of them seemed to be a rehash of what was in his last book before this one). My least favorite part was when he was pontificating all the rest of the time.

Once upon a time I would have plowed through this tome, but even when I picked it up at a yard sale I have moved past my jejune hungers for omnibus explanations. Worthwhile if you can parse it tho

Lots of gory detail on violence of the past and a generally convincing thesis in good style... Yes, we are not as violent, not in the same way, as a society.

However I would have preferred of the book was shorter and more to the point. I walk away with lots of extra visions of medieval torture that I had managed to avoid to date.