Mark Zuckerberg announces next 'Year of Reading' Facebook pick

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has selected the next title for his book club.

Zuckerberg said earlier this month that his goal for the New Year was to read a new book every other week and asked Facebook users to join him. His page for the challenge is titled “A Year of Books” (it currently has almost 300,000 likes) and the first book he selected, “The End of Power” by Moisés Naím, shot up bestseller lists on websites like Amazon. Naím participated in a question-and-answer session on the “Year of Books” Facebook page. 

Now the book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker has been named as the second title in the reading challenge. The pick was revealed on the "Year of Reading" Facebook page on Jan. 18. 

In our 2011 review of the book, Monitor critic Jordan Michael Smith wrote that the book is “exhilarating and exasperating, impressive and embarrassing. Pinker musters a lot of data to show that, contrary to impressions gleaned from the nightly news, violence both between states and within them have declined significantly. Little of this is new…. The book is continually provocative and thoughtful, it must be said, even if it is not always persuasive. Occasionally the data is misleading…. But for the most part the book’s numbers are solid…. Where Pinker goes wrong – sometimes deeply wrong – is in some of his other explanations of these phenomena. He is far too optimistic about the irreversibility of progress that has been made.”