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Robert Wright has the odd distinction of having written one of the best non-fiction books of the past decade (The Moral Animal) and now, with Nonzero, one of the most disappointing. How it happened is a bit of a mystery. The Moral Animal, a summary of developments in the field of evolutionary psychology, was tightly organized, well-argued and eloquent. The book's thesis--that human nature is rooted in our genetic code, itself honed through millions of years of evolution-stood on the shoulders of the giants (from Darwin to Dawkins) who laid its scientific and theoretical foundation. Wright's contribution was to distill their work into an accessible but lucid package, with the particularly clever device of illustrating the principles that guide human behavior with examples from Darwin's own life. With Nonzero, Wright extends the argument to claim that human societies (like the species itself) evolve, compete and adapt. That idea itself is not controversial. But Wright adds the gloss that societal evolution takes place in an arc that inevitably leads to further complexity and "progress". Here, unfortunately, he is trying to be original. Even if Wright happens to be right--and he may be--the lack of a scholarly foundation for his arguments is painfully evident throughout the book. Wright proves again and again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His acquaintance with history is broad but not deep. Errors, overgeneralizations and a tendency to confuse trivia with truth riddle his accounts of human civilizations. He is willing to toss in any idea--no matter how thinly reasoned--that supports his argument on any particular page. This leads to breathtaking leaps of fact and logic, such as a passage attributing the "many millions who died in the Holocaust" to the 19th century German nationalism provoked "when industrialization swept lands that had just barely left the Middle Ages." It's not just that Wright knows next to nothing about 19th century Germany--or Ming China, or Tokugawa Japan, or Medieval Europe, or dozens of other civilizations he discusses. It's not just that he gets facts wrong or (more often) rips them out of context. It's that he doesn't seem to care. He's so sure he knows the arc of civilization that the details don't really matter. Inconvenient facts are disregarded or sculpted to support the narrative. Thus the Dark Ages and Feudalism are represented as advances over the Roman Empire. The collapse of great civilizations is always portrayed as the triumph of some progressive force (Wright even offers six bullet points in favor of barbarians). All developments--even contradictory ones--are presented as positive. Centralization or decentralization, political unity or disunity, nationalism or transnationalism--it's all good, according to Wright, at the particular moment they arose. Here Wright dangles perilously between the dialectics of Hegel and the optimism of Dr. Pangloss. Which, incidentally, suggests a possible reason for the failure of the book. Unlike The Moral Animal, where Wright obviously profited from immersion in the major works of evolutionary psychology, Nonzero gives short shrift to the theorists who have explored the meaning and direction of history in much greater depth and breadth than Wright has. (Hegel, Marx, Toynbee and Spengler come to mind). There are some shoulders to stand on, but Wright prefers his own two feet, however shaky. Perhaps he thinks that evolutionary psychology and game theory are ideas that make previous efforts obsolete. They don't. There's nothing in the notion that societies compete and adapt and evolve that would have astonished Kant or Hegel. And there's nothing to suggest that Wright's vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century allows him to see more clearly than his precedessors--and plenty of reason to believe that it doesn't. The book recovers somewhat (and earns a second star) in its final chapters, when the subject shifts from history back to science. Still, Nonzero reads like two separate books (or long essays) awkwardly fused together. Beyond the merits of its argument, the book's glib and casual style is tiring. The lively, measured prose of the Moral Animal has gone AWOL. (And surely the author could have found alternatives to countless appearances of awkward phrases like "non-zero-sumness"). Is Nonzero worth reading? No time spent thinking about these subjects is wasted, but there are better guides than this one.