How the mind works
Steven Pinker is amazing. He's someone I'd love to take a course from. He's also received lots of attention for his writings on nature vs nurture, and is one of those extremely bright people that it would be fun to be able to sit with for hours and ask lots of questions.
Most of the ideas in his books about the origins of the mind are speculative (and must be taken on faith, since proving evolutionary history is just as challenging as proving the existence of God), but his assertions about neuroanatomy do appear to be consistent with our understanding of the mind as it is being explored. He brings imagination and enthusiasm to the challenge of explaining all this to the layman, and some how it all seems to work (though not necessarily without effort on the reader's part). Pinker's writing is usually quite engaging, and he approaches the task with a less arrogant tone than other scientists often do. The problem is that these ideas are interesting, but not always convincing.
As an evolutionary biologist, he always looks for a genetic origin for nearly everything - even religion. But just because such an origin is possible does not mean that it happened that way - just that it might have. So if you're looking for intriguing explanations about how something as complex as our minds could have evolved, this is the book for you. But whether that's fact or speculation will (at least for some time) remain a question that falls in the grey area between science and religion.
