Pinker might be optimistic, but in a pretty naive way. His method is ignoring the problems. He's very much an advocate of business-as-usual. There really isn't a lot of wiggle room in his philosophy as he (the thought daddy) has already figured out exactly how the "mind" works and therefore his political prescriptions MUST be correct. Christ.
I thought so too, until Bill Gates declared it his favourite book of all time. Clearly you can be a billionaire yet remain very ignorant of certain things.
No and based on your statement I was assuming it was a history. I'm disappointed it's not a history of hundreds of years of European history based on a class he took in the sixties. I was expecting this But serious and starring Immanuel Kant, the Founding Fathers and Isaac Newton