It's always a pleasure to read a Pinker book and this one is certainly no exception. The story so far: although we still do plenty of horrible things to each other, we don't do them nearly as often as we used to, and most of the horrible things we do today aren't nearly as horrible as the horrible things we used to do.

This is a great book that everybody should (try to) read. OK, it's 700 pages of tiny print, so beyond my capability, but I did read all but chapters 8 and 9. That means I got all of the author's lively description of how violence has declined dramatically, but I missed some of the description of brain structures that explain why this might be true. But even without the "why" of the sub-title I loved this book, mostly for its debunking of conventional wisdom and its humor. Within the constraints of those 700 pages of tiny print, it's actually quite readable. My big disappointment is that it was published in 2011. I would have loved to have heard his take on Trump.

This was so interesting and I learned a lot. It is long but so worth it. All things are explained and with sources. It crushes a lot of "I can't believe how horrible the world is today. It wasn't like that in my day" and people who see the past in a more romantic life. It's given me a lot of things to think about.

Pretty eye opening book. Introduces the fact that violence has declined over time, but goes deep into every factor that influences this. After reading, I am amazed we are where we are, lot of things had to go right to make the world we are living in today.

This book is absolutely wonderful and sheds a light of optimism on the past and future of humanity. The first chapters are devoted to arguing Mr Pinker's point with the numbers while the remaining one describe the underlining psychological reasons that support such trends. The language used is clear which makes this book very accessible even for non-specialists. The only thing that annoyed me a bit was that sometimes all the data is a bit confusing !

Now, more than ever, I wish Goodreads let you give half stars. 3.5, I think. I appreciate the depth and breadth of the research and arguments, and there's a whole damned lot to think about here, which is always nice, and ideally what you read for, at least sometimes, but there was also a hell of a lot of generalizations, old-white-man condescending (did you know racism and sexism are over in uber-feminist Western democracies? I sure as hell didn't!), and boy I'd like to know how this book would look if it were written now rather than 9 years ago.

I really enjoy reading Steven Pinker. After reading The Better Angels of Our Nature my outlook on the world has changed. What more could you ask of your book?

This book is not merely a catalog of the decreases in violence. Well it is in the first part of the book. It's difficult to imagine the magnitude of violence before current times. And the common day abuses. The second part of the book looks at some of the potential causes of lower violence (the Leviathan in strong democracies, the Rights revolutions to name a couple) and puts these ideas into the setting of a Prisoner's Dilemma to explain why societies would move towards non-violent options.

Really interesting, especially the first 2/3 of the book that describes the historical changes that have led to a decrease in violence. Some of the psychology discussed in the latter 1/3rd was not as interesting but overall a really engaging book. I think sometimes Pinker veers into opinion rather than evidence and some of the sources cited are questionable (The bell curve for example) but overall a compelling argument.

An excellent antidote to "gloom and doom."