Enlightenment now (Penguin Books)

'My new favourite book of all time' Bill Gates TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality.

Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide.

Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress.

The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past.

In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe.

We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one. Compelling... At a moment when liberal Enlightenment values are under attack, from the right and the left, this is a very important contribution...

An impressive and useful accomplishment * Atlantic * Things are not as bad as your Facebook news feed makes them seem... A cheerful, contrarian tract for dark times -- Niall Ferguson * Boston Globe * Guys, it's really not that bad.

In fact, it's the best it's ever been... Pinker urges people to look at the bigger picture and dive into the data * New York Post * Enlightenment Now seeks to undo, with facts and figures, the pessimism that has paralysed the world...

We must read this book and absorb its message * El Pais (Colombia) * Useful and exciting... Pinker doesn't declaim, he demonstrates - with dozens of graphs and charts - that humankind has spent two centuries winning the battle against entropy in all fields: from health to peace, the environment to democracy, wealth to happiness, to equality between m