Very nice

"Steven Pinker has read the reports on civilian deaths in the Afghan war, mass rapes in the Congo, “going postal” shootings in the United States, and our youths’ seeming addiction to Call of Duty video games. Yet the Harvard cognitive scientist and wildly effective popularizer of evolutionary psychology brings you the Good News: humans are now far less violent than they have ever been. In roughly 700 pages of text and many dozens of graphs, Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature takes us on a long trip through millennia of brutality and sadism to arrive at a time, our time, when we ain’t going to study war—nor, for that matter, wife-beating, animal torture, or burning at the stake—no more.
Professional historians have known this news for decades; in their field, it is conventional wisdom that violence has declined over the centuries in both rate and savagery. Now Pinker brings his considerable analytical powers and rhetorical skills to tell this story to the wider public. He can be heard on NPR, seen on The Colbert Report, and read about in New York Times features. The Times’s Nicholas Kristof is ready to award The Better Angels of Our Nature a Pulitzer. Unlike the historians, many lay readers and listeners are surprised. “Really?!” Stephen Colbert asked in one of his less parodic moments. Really.
Pinker also means to deliver on the book’s subtitle, “Why Violence Has Declined.” But while his chronicle is powerfully and convincingly straightforward—rates of violence have indeed decreased—his explanations are less so. They may even undermine his campaign for a biological view of the human condition."