Table Of Content

< div class="Basic-Text-Frame" aid="11"> Praise for Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature A New York Times Notable Book A Library Journal Best Book of the Year One of Amazon’s 100 Best Books of the Year A NetGalley Best of 2011 “For anyone interested in human nature, the material is engrossing, and when the going gets heavy, Pinker knows how to lighten it with ironic comments and a touch of humor. . . . A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement.” —The New York Times Book Review “An extraordinary range of research . . . a masterly effort.” —The Wall Street Journal “It is quite a story, and Pinker tells it ably. There are stimulating thoughts on nearly every page.” —New York “Better Angels is a monumental achievement. His book should make it much harder for pessimists to cling to their gloomy vision of the future. Whether war is an ancient adaptation or a pernicious cultural infection, we are learning how to overcome it.” —Slate.com “Classic Pinker, jammed with facts, figures, and points of speculative departure; a big, complex book, well worth the effort for the good news that it delivers.” —Kirkus Reviews “This long, well-researched, comprehensive tour de force provides a helpful look at the human condition.” —Booklist “A hugely important work and major contribution to historiography.” —Niall Ferguson, professor of history, Harvard University, and author of Civilization: The West and the Rest < iv class="Basic-Text-Frame" aid="21"> PENGUIN BOOKS THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on language and cognition has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the American Psychological Association, and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received several teaching awards, eight honorary doctorates, and many prizes for his nine books, including The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , The Blank Slate , and The Better Angels of Our Nature . His most recent book, The Sense of Style , was a New York Times bestseller. He has been named Humanist of the Year and has been listed among Foreign Policy magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time ’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is currently Chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for The New York Times , Time , The New Republic , and other publications. v aid="31"> ALSO BY STEVEN PINKER Language Learnability and Language Development Learnability and Cognition The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Words and Rules The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought EDITED BY STEVEN PINKER Visual Cognition Connections and Symbols Lexical and Conceptual Semantics The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 id="41">