Tag: fall books

Whenever Steven Pinker, the “hyper-articulate” Harvard psychology professor, releases a new book, the media—and, more importantly, the public—takes notice. Following up on his book The Stuff of Thought, about how language helps shape who we are, Pinker is set to release The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Years in the making, the book argues that despite what we might think—with wars raging and crime headlines monopolizing front pages—we may actually be less violent as a society right now than at any previous point in history.

The Better Angels of Our Nature has been highlighted by the Globe and Mail as one of the Fall’s Ten Surefire Hits, alongside titles by Michael Ondaatje, Michael Moore, Niall Ferguson, and Haruki Murakami. Here is their gushing write up:

With his telegenic flowing locks and hyper-articulateness, Canadian Steven Pinker is the rock star of evolutionary psychology. He’s also on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The self-assured Pinker burst into public awareness with the massive How the Mind Works, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that tracked an evolutionary origin for human behaviours. His new book counterintuitively argues that human violence has been on the wane for millennia, which could only have happened had human nature evolved. Sure to be much debated.

Read about keynote speaker Steven Pinker