Books by author: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a very talented writer of popular science, and this book is in some sense the logical consequence of his outstanding book, The Language Instinct. My enthusiasm is somewhat damped because I fully expected to gain a lot of insight from this book, but having already read The Society of Mind, Godel, Escher, Bach, Consciousness Explained, The Selfish Gene, Vision, and The Language Instinct, there wasn't very much new here for me. If you haven't read those books, How the Mind Works is a good place to start (though you should definitely read at least The Selfish Gene as a companion text). Pinker does a credible job of framing many aspects of human life and society in evolutionary terms, and while some of the passages on the differences between men and women will make many liberal readers cringe, there is merit in Pinker's arguments. In my opinion, this book is "less-Chomsky, more-Pinker", relative to The Language Instinct, and that's a good thing. Perhaps my biggest criticism is that in a one hour talk Pinker gave on the day I bought this book, he gave away all of the good jokes contained in the book. I had previously thought that his bag of tricks was deeper.

Certainly the best- written popular science I've ever read. Contains a lot of accumulated insight into human language. I'm intrigued by the notion of a DNA-coded Universal Human Language, and the evidence is compelling.