The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.77 (953 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B005SA64YS |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 518 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-09-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
T. L. Cooper said For Better or Worse, The Story of Violence. I've struggled a bit to write this review because I have mixed feelings about The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker.I started reading The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined with the attitude that Pinker needed to first convince me violence had declined before getting into explaining why. To be perfectly honest, given the world we currently live in, it's hard to imagine that violence has declined.While I finished the book convinced that violence has declined, I felt like the explanations for why seemed more hypothetical than proven. Pinker explored violence quite thoroughly b. Anton Moscovitch said This is a book I wish I could have liked. I admire Pinker’s easy writing style and erudition. This is a book I wish I could have liked. I admire Pinker’s easy writing style and erudition abundantly displayed in some of his earlier books (such as the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works). Unfortunately “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” is one of those that deserve the truism “What is true in it was known before while everything not already known is probably false”.For example, in his “Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "This is a book I wish I could have liked. I admire Pinker’s easy writing style and erudition" according to Anton Moscovitch. This is a book I wish I could have liked. I admire Pinker’s easy writing style and erudition abundantly displayed in some of his earlier books (such as the Language Instinct and How the Mind Works). Unfortunately “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” is one of those that deserve the truism “What is true in it was known before while everything not already known is probably false”.For example, in his “Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) Ian Morris argued. 010) Ian Morris argued. mjfjr said A must read!. Im only 1"A must read!" according to mjfjr. Im only 120 pages into it! What a great work. Well written. Nice work of philosophy, history and number crunching. The charts in some of the chapters back up the numbers and give a great visual to the read. The destruction of violence myths are a nice reality trip after having news about war, crimes not to mention terrorism thrown at us everyday on the news. A must read. I cant put it down.. 0 pages into it! What a great work. Well written. Nice work of philosophy, history and number crunching. The charts in some of the chapters back up the numbers and give a great visual to the read. The destruction of violence myths are a nice reality trip after having news about war, crimes not to mention terrorism thrown at us everyday on the news. A must read. I cant put it down.
Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals - all substantially down.How could this have happened, if human nature has not changed? What led people to stop sacrificing children, stabbing each other at the dinner table, or burning cats and disemboweling criminals as forms of popular entertainment? Was it reading novels, cultivating table manners, fearing the police, or turning their energies to making money? Should the nuclear bomb get the Nobel Peace Prize for preventing World War III? Does rock and roll deserve the blame for the doubling of violence in the 1960s - and abortion deserve credit for the reversal in the 1990s? Not exactly, Pinker argues. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. The murder rate in medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. This gripping book is sure to be among the most debated of the century so far.. We've all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, "What is the world coming to?" But we seldom ask, "How bad was the world in the past?" In this startling new book, the best-selling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the wor