This is a readable, amiable book. Music certainly is fascinating, and enjoyable, a human universal in one form or another, as the author's examples show. But the dumb as well as the smart listen to it, the warlike as well as the peaceful. In other words, not a convincing thesis. It may be the physical activity that music accompanies (playing, singing, dancing) that is effective, instead. One also wonders why it is Mozart (rather than, say, the religious musical tapestries of Bach) that is featured and favored here. To his contemporaries Mozart was a controversial genius and full of jokes, human rather than devine and worshipful. One of these years we can hope for studies of the real effects of the experiment whereby the State of Georgia provides a Classical music disk to all newborns: does their rate of acceptance to college go up, the number enrolling in the Army go down, etc.?
I recommend Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, by Robert Jourdain, instead (equally well-written, but far more systematic).