Author: Joulia Smortchkova
Series: Macat Library
Narrator: Macat.com
Unabridged: 1 hr 44 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway
Published: 07/15/2016
Genre: Social Science - Sociology
Published in 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a gloriously optimistic book. In it, well-known cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put forward an argument that contradicted what most people believed at the time. Pinker said that despite humanity’s biological tendency toward violence, we are, in fact, less violent today than ever before. To prove it, he laid out pages of detailed statistical evidence. For him, much of the credit for the decline goes to the Enlightenment, the important intellectual movement of eighteenth-century Europe. Enlightenment thinkers argued for ideas of liberty, tolerance, and respect for the value of human life. As those ideas filtered down through society, they affected the way people thought. That psychological change led to behavioral change—and overall we became more peaceful. But the book sparked a blazing debate. Some critics passionately disagreed that humanity could overcome the biological urge toward violence. Others argued that Pinker’s statistics were too focused on the West, too limited, and even simply flawed. The debate still rages on…
In 1978 Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time." A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding cert...
Drawing on studies of social class, crime and deviance, education, work in bureaucracies, and changes in religious and political organizations, this Very Short Introduction explores the tension between the individual's place in society and society's...
From Kemet to NYC; ancient keys to positive social change. The African American Family is in disarray due to an unworkable social contract. Causing confusion in the home and anarchy in the streets. The problems are complex, but the answers are simpl...
In these two devastatingly funny essays, Tom Wolfe examines political stances, social styles, black rage, and white guilt in our status-minded world. In These Radical Chic Evenings, Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the ...
Conversations about race in the United States are fraught to the point of dysfunction. Whose fault is it… Purchase this in-depth summary to learn more.
Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is a political treatise against slavery, war, and an argument that individuals not cede excessive power to government. A masterpiece of American individualism, the essay is considered b...
From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today—and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood....
One of the most interesting topics of discussion, sociology, has been the subject of attention for a really long time. You are lucky to have landed here if you have been wondering about all the details of this topic. I assure you that you are not go...
Do you know the top seven things men do that drive women nuts? Or the real reason women cry more than men do? What are men really looking for in a woman—both at first sight and for the long-term? These are only the starting points for Barbara ...