The Storytelling Animal

Although Pinker calls it "witty," it is a far-cry from such excellent scientific journalism as Gleick ("Chaos"). It has the flair and style of a marketer or a Daily Beast blog writer; with a primary goal of justified entertainment (indeed, one of the central arguments is that there is an evolutionary advantage to the entertainment provided by stories), he intermixes edgy sexuality, drug references, and admittedly-bad-taste examples as he throws around some shallow research and lots of hypotheticals about why stories are good for us. Of course, he's right on most accounts; but the style in general was distasteful fluff, and his findings were just science saying, "You know that thing you've always thought, that makes good sense? Science says, you're probably right."

I would recommend it to friends who don't know why I research narrative if the writing weren't so sensational and unprincipled.