I read this book on and off over a 6-month period, and am so glad I did. A wide-ranging, heavily researched, yet mostly accessible analysis of the decline of violence throughout the totality of human history. Pinker is extremely persuasive, and if I had only taken elective Statistics in college I might have a better shot at assessing the contents critically. It's hard to argue with some of the figures calculating estimated deaths by violence as a proportion of the human population throughout history. Pinker's explanations are possibly debatable, but are certainly cogently argued. They include, among many others, the rise of the Leviathan, or state, which holds the monopoly on violence in a given population, the increase in commerce, which creates more win-win situations among groups, the slow feminization of cultures in parts of the world, more widespread capacity for abstract thinking across populations, and my favorite, the spread of literacy and fiction and its natural enhancement of empathetic thinking.
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