Peterson constantly shares stories from the book during his lectures and talks about Solzhenitsyn’s other great books. Peterson ranked “The Gulag Archipelago” as the No. Also, his edition has been abridged into one volume at the author’s wish and with his full cooperation. Hence, it is a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.

Surely, the work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors and the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s eleven years in labor camps and exile. The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centers, and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators, and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. Likewise, Jordan Peterson considers this an endearing work on the current state of world affairs among his favorites.īuy Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker Now: Also, it is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. But this progress is not the result of some cosmic force. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are rising, not just in the West but worldwide. So, is the world falling apart? Also, is the idea of progress obsolete? Certainly, in this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urge us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases.

If you think the world is ending, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Books by jordan peterson