An amazing and astonishing book, and one that I think that everyone should read. Although I have to admit I found the last few chapters a bit more of slog than the first several.

Pinter expects people will have a hard time believing that violence has declined dramatically throughout history, and especially in recent decades; after all we hear about murders and wars and so on on the news all the time. So he spends the first several chapters going over all kinds of violence (wars, murder, rape, torture, witch hunts, genocide, etc.) and provides charts showing the decline in all of them throughout history, often with more detail on how they have declined recently. He also goes over why it's believed each kind of violence has declined. His tone is analytical and occasionally wry (when needed), since the sheer numbers of people who have suffered and died, and the few times when he gets into details (mostly in the chapter on torture; where he spells out what was standard procedure in most of Europe throughout much of its history) are truly horrifying. One statistic that stuck with me is that the rate of violent death in pre-historic groups (as figured from the remains we've found) was 15%, and that number is also characteristic of many hunter-gatherer cultures in recent history. Think about that; of every 100 people you know, 15 of them would die by violence. The murder rate in the US today is about 3 people per 100,000. The most boring, beige, suburban subdivision begins to look like the epitome of civilization, as indeed it is.

The later chapters go into more depth on the reasons that violence has declined tremendously in the last few centuries, and especially the last sixty years. Pinter is not trying to say that violence will never go up again, or that it will ever totally disappear, but that by figuring out what ideas and movements have contributed to the decline of violence we can hopefully encourage those ideas, encourage peace and peacefulness, keep the rate of violence low and hopefully make it decline more.