A Collection of Book Reviews Originally Written for WorldCat

Alexander, Amir. Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Originally reviewed in 2018: Those naughty Jesuits and the History of Math

Admittedly, I am into history and into math, but I enjoyed this book. Others might be less enthusiastic. It explains in detail a chapter of the history of math and science that was part of a broader cultural struggle within the history of western civilization. It parallels the more famous struggle over physics and astronomy between Galileo and his opponents, but it delves more into the methodological disagreement. The writing is a little slow, and at times I felt that the author had to stretch the story out into a full-length book, but for someone less familiar with math and the politics of seventeenth century science, perhaps it proceeds at the right pace. The author does a good job of filling out the political and military context within which these fights over math and astronomy took place.

A brief note: the use of infinitesimals in mathematics underlies the mathematics of calculus. Infinitesimals are critical for the mathematical study of motion and change, and without them, it is difficult to develop mathematically-based scientific theories and sophisticated technology. Basically, if you don't have infinitesimals, you can't start an industrial revolution.

Historical Context: the Reformation, Copernicus, and Galileo

The book starts with the Protestant Reformation. The initial success of Luther's Reformation caused a crisis within the Roman Catholic Church. Rising to the fore of Catholic Europe were the Jesuits, specifically modelled on a military organization. The Jesuits wanted to reassert the religious dominance of the Pope, and they believed that the only way that could be achieved was to implement a strict hierarchy of institutional and philosophical order. They inculcated the idea of willed obedience. Those lower in the hierarchy had to choose to be strictly obedient to those higher in the order. A diversity of ideas and opinions was not tolerated. The internal discipline of the Jesuit order allowed them to halt the spread of Protestantism in areas where their educational system had been established.

This religious conflict helps explain the harsh treatment of Galileo by the Jesuits. He was advocating a revolution in how one views the orientation of the cosmos. Although Copernicus was Catholic, Protestant scholars at Wittenberg and Protestant book printers in Nuremberg were the driving force behind publishing his heliocentric system, and the theory had a whiff of Protestantism. The medieval geocentric system was in harmony with the Aristotelian principles that were core to Roman Catholic philosophy. The new Copernican model was an overthrow of the previous structure of ideas just at a time when the Jesuits were dealing harshly with disorder.

I had for many years suspected that the house arrest of Galileo was in part provoked by the religious struggle in the Thirty Years War, and this book details that connection. In the 1610s, the Holy Office led by a Jesuit had warned Galileo about his ideas. The war started soon afterward. Early in the war, Catholic military success had allowed more tolerant authorities to gain control of the Catholic Church in the 1620s. Those authorities relaxed pressure on Galileo's Copernican ideas. But in the 1630s Gustavus Adolphus led Protestant battlefield victories against Catholic armies, and the era of intellectual tolerance disappeared. The hard-line Jesuits once again took political control and had Galileo condemned. This book does an excellent job of explaining that military and political context for the reader.

Mathematics

When you use infinitesimals, you say that you can sum up an infinite number of dimensionless objects and arrive at a non-zero quantity. There is something profoundly illogical about this sleight of hand. How can an infinity of zeros equal one? Infinitesimals are thus paradoxical. The philosophical problems with calculus were only solved in the 1830s, two hundred years later. Despite the paradox, if you charge ahead and use infinitesimals anyway, you can arrive at powerful results that you cannot get by traditional geometric proofs. In short, infinitesimals are crazy, but they are magical.

As the Jesuit order was developing, Jesuit mathematicians succeeded in elevating the importance of math in their ideology because traditional Euclidean geometry is a perfect example of order. If you choose to obey a small number of axioms and postulates and rules for proof, then you can with a little effort generate books full of interesting mathematical theorems. If you accept the premises, the results must follow by necessity. That model reflected well the sort of order that the Jesuits were trying to instill in politics and religious doctrine. Those crazy infinitesimals violated the strict Euclidean order and with it the rest of the conceptual and political order of the Jesuits, so the Jesuits pushed to forbid and reject infinitesimals.

Meanwhile in England, the Protestants were trying to build a diverse political order allowing for a range of beliefs and political participants. They saw experimental science to be in harmony with their religious and political diversity. They looked askance at mathematics, with its rigid set of truths. However, John Wallis showed that by using infinitesimals, one could treat mathematics as an experimental science. And the innovative results that eventually developed into calculus and mathematical analysis helped reinforce the dynamic advances in other scientific disciplines and in engineering, eventually leading to the industrial revolution.

A side discussion in the book is the story of Thomas Hobbes. He fancied himself to be a cutting-edge mathematician, but like the Jesuits, he rejected infinitesimals for many of the same reasons, and his mathematics ended in failure. Wallis delighted in disproving his attempts to square the circle using traditional Euclidean methods. I found the discussion of Hobbes a bit of a sidetrack from the main conflict, but without that detour, there isn't enough material for an entire book.

Alexander ends the book arguing that the Jesuits succeeded in stamping out infinitesimals in Italy for a couple hundred years, and as a result Italy ended up as a mathematical and scientific backwater. Meanwhile, England leapt to the front of the industrial revolution. Now, as to whether or not the industrial revolution was a good thing for the planet ... that is another issue.

Chalmers, Alan F. What is this Thing Called Science? 3rd Edition. Hackett, 1999.

Review from 2006: I personally enjoy brief overviews of a scholarly topic, books such as Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. Chalmer's book is not in the Oxford series, but it has a similar compactness. I am sure that there are many issues Chalmers neglects and many scholars who would quibble with his approach. Nevertheless, I agree with his basic approach and philosophical framework. I read the third edition of the book.

Among the topics Chalmers tackles is the problem with induction in science. He delves into the limitations of Karl Popper's falsifiability. He introduces the reader to Imre Lakatos and shows why he is an important philosopher of science. Chalmers lays out a good and clear critique of Thomas Kuhn's equivocal theory of paradigms.

"Science Studies" are roughly a school of post-modern sociology that rejects the claim that scientific knowledge is any closer to Truth than any other form of belief. Scientific knowledge is socially constructed by agreement among scientists. This book is more in the tradition of viewing scientific research as moving our understanding of the observable world closer to an objective Truth, though we can never fully arrive at that omniscient endpoint.

Derry, Gregory. What Science is and how it Works. Princeton UP, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2006, 2023: Good Book, Not Too Demanding

This book is written for the general reader. It reviews the philosophy of science, current as of the end of the twentieth century. While it gives a passing nod to "science studies," it is in a more traditional school of understanding of science. The book gives good examples of where a change in the assumptions upon which observation is based changed the scientific knowledge considered correct. It emphasizes instruments and practice, and it spends less time on the finer points of the philosophy of science than other general surveys of science, such as Chalmers "What is this thing called science." It spends time defining science in terms of how it is practiced, such as by using models, quantifying in order to predict, etc. It discusses pseudoscience, the ethics of scientific research, and the relation between science and religion.

Derry stays at a popular writing level, but he carefully argues his way through the philosophical landscape underlying science. Well done, though I prefer the Chalmers book (see other review).

Dreger, Alice Domurat. Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar's Search for Justice. Paperback edition. Penguin Books, 2016.

Originally reviewed in 2020

I am a fan of the philosophy and history of science. Dreger has been in a number of fights over the social application of science, and this book recounts them in detail. The writing is smooth, the stories are engaging, and the conclusions sometimes surprising. Well worth the reading.

Dreger began her career as a graduate student in the history of science. A professor suggested that for her dissertation, she could write about the history of how the medical establishment treated people with intersex conditions, people whose genitalia did not develop in a fashion typical for persons of their sex. One colleague joked that she never had to worry about her topic being relevant. Almost immediately, her research threw her into high profile controversy. She discovered that medical doctors had historically treated intersex children poorly and that they were still doing so.

Until recently, upon seeing an intersex infant, doctors would pressure the parents to agree to surgery to alter the genitalia of their infant, so that the equipment looked more normal. Dreger's historical research helped bolster the arguments of a group of activists who promoted the position that intersex children should not be subjected to surgery but should be supported in their circumstances as intersex individuals.

The point of Dreger's first fight was that she used scholarship and science to support the claims of activists against a medical establishment that seemed socially conservative and authoritarian and not sensitive to the actual best interests of their patients. She admits that she came to her work from a liberal viewpoint.

In her second fight, she got into a controversy, but when she went over all the evidence, she discovered that the activists who were accusing the tenured professor of being a moral monster were themselves fighting against the scientific evidence, and that the professor was being unfairly vilified. Michael Bailey wrote a book about transsexuals that upset some trans women, and they marshalled their allies to attack him. Dreger again spent time and shoe leather to establish the evidence of what had happened.

Dreger then went on to examine the case of Napoleon Chagnon, who had been shamed by the anthropological establishment. His conclusions from years spent in the Amazon support the arguments of sociobiologists about human nature. Again, through much effort, Dreger showed that Chagnon had been mistreated by those who disagreed with his conclusions. What was especially poignant here was that Dreger herself was by her own political inclination opposed to Chagnon's program. Yet she fought for the integrity of the scientific process.

Dreger's next big fight was over a medical researcher who was experimenting unethically on pregnant women and their children. The researcher was receiving NIH funding by saying that she was studying the safety of a treatment. But she was telling the patients that the treatment was safe and the normal standard of care. Dreger found this fight especially difficult because the federal oversight boards were not doing their due diligence to make sure that the treatment was safe. In the process, she discovered that the health journalists who might have come to her aid had been gutted from their news departments because of the loss of revenue from the internet.

Dreger added a final chapter to the book after it was published in hard cover, so make sure you read the paperback. In her final chapter, she discovered that her own university, which had time and again gone to bat for her academic freedom as a defender of scientific truth, had begun partnering with corporations. As part of the effort to maintain their brand in the collegiate marketplace, they established a committee that could censor her work. She resigned in protest.

An inspiring story of someone who stuck to her scholarly and scientific guns. Her point: you need to use your science to engage with your society, but you also need science to inform your activism. Things can go badly if you have one without the other.

Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992. University of California Press, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2013: Important historical records and perspective

This book is a vast overview of the history of people rehashing the Galileo trial. Finocchiaro first reviews the trial itself, providing for the first time in English translation many texts critical to the trial. That alone is worth five stars. Then he provides an historiographic survey of the way later critics and propagandists have used and manipulated the Galileo trial over centuries of cultural struggle. Although his detail can be ploddingly minute and his distinctions can be hair-splitting, Finocchiaro's prose is good and the text is readable.

The Galileo case is very complex with subtle distinctions. It is also iconic and has been used for centuries in contests by many cultural groups. It really is important to get the story as complete and as accurate as one can, in order to refute uses of Galileo that are truly wrong. By offering translations from Latin and Italian into English of many documents for the first time, the book does an invaluable service to anyone trying to be as precise as possible. Finocchiaro's historiography is also important for getting a larger sense of the uses to which the story has been put in the history of Western culture. A Ph.D. dissertation on this topic that did not use this book (or the original documents it translates) should be rejected by the committee.

To give you a sense of the complexity, note for example that the Pope, speaking ex cathedra, never said that the theory that the earth circles the sun (the heliocentric theory) was heretical. Instead, a consultant's report to the Inquisition did. So technically, the Church as a whole did not brand heliocentricism as heretical. For all practical purposes the heliocentric theory was banned as though it was officially heretical, but technically it was not. Even the Church authorities at the time couldn't keep straight whether or not Galileo had been formally convicted of heresy. Because such subtle distinctions are important to Finocchiaro, he judges most popular accounts about Galileo's trial to be awash in inaccuracy and falsehood.

Another example of subtlety: in no text from the time of the trial did anyone establish (or even speculate) that the motivation for Galileo's sentence was that the Pope felt that Galileo had called him a simpleton. That theory was first put to paper only years later. Now, the Pope's motive might have actually been that he felt Galileo called him a simpleton, and in hindsight it is reasonable that he would have felt that way, but if it was the motive, the Pope kept it to himself. There is no evidence from the time that anyone even supposed that that was the motive. Consequently, popular accounts should not offer that as the motive for the sentence against Galileo, and many have. It works as drama, but not as accurate history.

One of the book's conclusions was that the Roman Catholic Church really did pick on Galileo unfairly in 1632 and that Galileo was in fact correct about what the 1616 rules were for his behavior. Apologists for the church who try to claim that the church did not err in its handling of the case are ultimately wrong. Many apologists for the Church over the centuries have tried to split the guilt evenly between Galileo and the Inquisition, claiming that they both were to blame, but a careful look at the evidence shows that the Inquisition committed an injustice, and that the Church has never completely admitted its error. Galileo may have practiced brinksmanship, but in both scientific epistemology and theological reasoning, Galileo did not err and did not violate the instructions he was given in 1616. A fair trial would not have convicted him.

Another conclusion was that, even after John Paul II closed the case in 1992, Galileo was still not formally rehabilitated by the Roman Catholic Church. When I read in the New York Times on Sunday, November 1, 1992, that the Pope had finally admitted that Galileo was right, I thought that it was for the first time and that it was a complete rehabilitation. The fact is that Galileo has been implicitly rehabilitated repeatedly by the Church starting around 1820, but to Finocchiaro's exacting standards, the Church has never explicitly reopened the trial and formally exonerated him. The most thorough rehabilitation actually took place in 1942. In 1992, the head of the papal commission was still somewhat anti-Galileo, and John Paul II actually got up after the commission report and gave a speech that was more pro-Galileo than his own commission. And because he was not speaking ex cathedra, his views still weren't technically the official church position.

Here are my own observations to give the Roman Catholic Church some slack: those who want a simple moral to the story miss the roles of accessible evidence, cultural politics, and personal action in the outcome of the situation. Had someone thought of Foucault's pendulum in 1620, heliocentricism might have been accepted quietly. Had heliocentricism not been associated with Protestantism and had the Thirty Years War not been raging in Europe in 1632, the cardinals might not have been as aggressive. Had Galileo not enjoyed humiliating his opponents so much, he might not have gotten humiliated by them in turn. The outcome was more contingent that some like to believe.

As a librarian, one fact I found amusing was that supporters of Galileo began preparing a more widely readable, Latin version of Two World Systems as soon as the trial began in order to capitalize on the book's notoriety. They published it with the help of Elzevier just a few years later with strong sales, in part because it was banned. You can't buy that kind of advertising, then or now. Go banned book week!

Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford UP, 2001.

Originally reviewed in 2006, revised 2023

This book, Science, Truth and Democracy, examines the issues raised by the anti-science movements that claim that scientific knowledge is socially constructed and reflects politics rather than reality. He does a pretty good job deflecting the main charge that scientific knowledge is merely socially constructed, but then highlights a close cousin that he believes is in fact the case.

Kitcher points out that while a scientific answer may not be a political creation, the question is asked within a context of values, and so it is politically charged. Or, another way of saying it is that epistemic significance is context-dependent. Because the results of previous research will change our practical projects, the world in which we formulate new questions will itself change. In this way, the politics of the past intrude onto the way we frame our current agenda. To use one of his analogies, early maps had features picked because of the values of the mapmakers. Those maps will then guide us to alter the world through our actions in certain ways. Modern maps objectively show features that would not exist except for the value judgments of previous mapmakers about what was epistemically significant to them.

You could compare this to the agency of a charismatic leader. It was said that Steve Jobs had a 'reality distortion field' that caused those around him to see the world the way he wanted them to see it. They were inspired to go out and create that world. What had not been factual about the world became factual about the world.

Kitcher calls for democratizing the process for setting the scientific agendas in our research and development funding agencies. Apparently, the research agenda at the NIH is set largely by senior researchers, without a great deal of direct input from lay persons, except those that can lobby Congress to earmark funding. Postscript: In the post-Trump political sphere, democratizing science might not be a good thing. Creationism, anyone?

Kitcher ends by pointing out that a particular research agenda might have morally questionable features that can be addressed by the priorities of the broader society. When the broader society refuses to address those moral problems, the research itself may be morally questionable.

Levere, Trevor. Transforming Matter: a History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.

Originally reviewed in 2012: A Tour of the History of Chemistry

This book was highly recommended by scholars when it came out as a well-written and accurate history of chemistry, and I feel that it lived up to its recommendation. The writing is clear enough so that someone such as I (who has nearly no chemical training) can understand it, but thorough enough that chemistry historians would not be bored by it. I have to trust other reviewers that the details are accurate, because I know little of the discipline. But I can affirm that the writing is clear.

Some books spend a great deal of time on alchemy and ancient chemical efforts. This book focuses more on chemistry from the late eighteenth century forward. Towards the end of the book, the chapters focus on the history of various subdisciplines, rather than a strict sequence of all chemical developments. Before reading this book, I had heard of Paracelsus, Newton's chemical investigations, Lavoisier, and Priestley, but I had not heard about Carl Scheele, Liebig, or Berthelot. The book tries to balance the history of chemical theory with the history of chemical techniques.

As of this writing, the book is over ten years old, so there may be more recent scholarship on the history of chemistry, but this book is a solid choice for those not concerned with the very latest details.

Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Great Devonian Controversy: the Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Originally reviewed in 2015: Science studies that are not bogus

This work doesn't need my help to cement its reputation as a classic study of how the sausage was made within a particular scientific community. Thanks to people who obsessively saved letters and other original documents, Rudwick was able to piece together in great detail the fine-grained activities of British geologists in the 1830s as they came to a group acceptance of how to characterize the geological record. It is a story with drama (at least for a fan of the history and philosophy of science) and enough British class intrigue for a season of Downton Abby. Rudwick then uses that case study to argue for a general theory about how scientific research is conducted. He rejects the claims of Science Studies researchers that scientific knowledge is nothing but a socially-agreed-upon account of the world that could be radically different, and the Devonian evidence gives him a strong position from which to defend his ideas. The history is well-written, and the theorizing is to the point.

The vast majority of the book is the detailed story of Murchison, De la Beche, and the other geologists who fought over the proper interpretation of the strata in Devonshire and its implications for geology in general. One interesting example: early on in the book, Rudwick explains the checkered fortunes of William Smith. Although his fossil method of determining geological strata eventually triumphed, there were good scientific reasons for rejecting it back when he first proposed it. The sidelining of him by the geological establishment was not completely a hatchet job. Smith then lived long enough for a later generation of geologists to refine his methods and declare him their long-suppressed founding father. By the fate of his longevity, as an old man, Smith was awarded a gold medal and the informal title Father of British Geology.

However, it is also true that the top geologists in London would appropriate ideas from amateur geologists in the countryside and hog the credit. Murchison appropriated observations and ideas from geologists in Shropshire for his Silurian system, for example. And the London geologists of a generation earlier took some of Smith's ideas in what could be seen as an upper class grab of lower class intellectual property. Still, the situation was not quite as unjust toward Smith as it is sometimes presented.

Since the 1980s, it has been philosophically fashionable to be a skeptic of scientific knowledge. Post-modern science studies have questioned the whig history of scientific and technical progress, arguing that science is a very human enterprise and full of ulterior motives and faults. But the radical end of science studies have questioned the ability of anyone to say anything scientifically valid about the world we live in. Rudwick excels at showing the messy, human side of the scientific enterprise, while at the same time showing that radical philosophical relativism is not warranted.

Rudwick disagrees with Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms. Kuhn's model is that normal science proceeds until it can no longer deal with contradictions and a paradigm shift occurs. Rudwick shows that there is more evolution of concepts and theories under normal science, and paradigm shifts are less total than Kuhn would have us believe.

One of Rudwick's parting metaphors for scientific theories is that of the map. A map is clearly an interpretation, a representation, a way of looking at some geography. But there is a thing out in the world that is being represented. Rudwick rejects both the naive realists, who deny that a scientific theory is a socially constructed interpretation, and the more radical science studies scholars who deny that any external reference (physical reality) has any influence over the outcome of the theory. Well done.

Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Picador, 1998.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Post-modern science wannabes get their come-uppance

Alan Sokal once played a very funny and telling joke on the "science studies" crowd of post-modern intellectuals. He wrote an article for one of their journals that was little more than a string of nonsensical pseudo-science. To anyone with a passing understanding of the subject, it was clearly nonsense. But it was filled with quotes from respected critics of science that were equally preposterous. And the respected "science studies" journal published it.

The current book is a subsequent treatment of the topic. Sokal and his collaborator, Bricmont, conduct in depth investigations of a variety of French intellectuals popular with the American post-modern programme to show that they did not understand the natural sciences and had at times spouted impressive-sounding nonsense that awed the ignorant. Lacan, Kristeva, and others come in for harsh treatment. While the book focuses on the French, they have many American followers who are just as ignorant of the science they criticize.

Sokal and Bricmont have been accused of being motivated by conservative politics hostile to the left post-modern agenda. They reply that they are simply trying to save the left from a pathological branch of itself.

The book only gets four stars because the litany of errors becomes repetitive and tiresome after a while.

Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Huge, but a classic, and well written

Westfall's biography of Newton is considered the definitive work on Newton. Beyond that, it is a good read. Yes, it is long, but it is not long and boring. Newton led an extraordinarily full and varied life, and Westfall captures it in great detail.

Things that I learned from this book:

• That, aside from being a scientist, Newton was a politician. He was elected to parliament during the crucial time when James II was overthrown. He opposed James when it was an unpopular position, then was part of the side that benefited from the Glorious Revolution.
• That he was friends with John Locke, and that Newton's mathematical physics strongly influenced Locke's political thinking, which then in turn influenced the formation of the United States. Newton is only one degree of separation from the U.S. Constitution.
• More interesting tidbits: That Cambridge was a bit of a joke when Newton was there. They issued just as many diplomas when they were closed for the plague as they did when they were open. Newton benefited from that lack of academic rigor because it freed him to reinvent mathematics and physics.
• That Newton learned geometry first from Descartes, whose algebraic geometry helped him conceptualize the Calculus more easily.
• That he became fearful that Descartes was an atheist, and that Cartesian geometry was atheistic, so when he presented the Calculus, he reworked the proofs so that he derived them from Greek geometry, making them much more difficult to understand.
• That he was a Christo-centric Unitarian who secretly thought the concept of the Trinity was the work of the Devil.
• More tidbits: That Newton not only dabbled in alchemy, but that he reached the highest ranks of it, only to find that it really didn't work, that he couldn't turn baser metals into gold. His thorough and rigorous experimentation convinced him that previous claims by alchemists were in fact false.
• That Newton then used his advanced knowledge of chemical metallurgy in his later work as the warden of the mint.
• That Newton was a ruthless warden who aggressively and successfully prosecuted and hanged counterfeiters and gold suppliers who tried to cheat the government. (I think that Britain, when it issues money with Newton's picture on it, should microprint for security the nickname the counterfeiters gave him: "That olde Dogg the warden.")
• Bigger facts: That he was a complete jerk. When he began his reign as the President of the Royal Society, he cruelly ruined several careers, including that of the astronomer at Greenwich, whose data was crucial to Newton's reputation.
• That without Edmund Halley's determination to publish Newton's findings as the Principia, Newton might never have come out of his obscure isolation.
• That Newton's secretiveness allowed the mathematicians on the European mainland to pass Britain in mathematical research.

As you can see, this book is packed full of the exciting twists and turns of a life that was never at rest.

Something I learned long after reading this book: The controversial Jewish Biblical scholar Abraham Yahuda felt that Newton's version of Unitarianism qualified as a version of Judaism. When Newton's papers were auctioned in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes bought many of the scientific papers for Cambridge University, but Yahuda bought many of the religious papers. They are now stored in the Newton Collection at the Jewish National and University Library. See Sarah Dry's The Newton Papers.

Adams, Colin and Thomas Garrity. The Great Pi / e Debate. [DVD]. Mathematical Association of America, 2006.

Originally reviewed in 2013: Great heaps of humorous insults but little math

I saw this video offered in the MAA catalog, so I watched it. It is underwhelming. There is a bit of math, and the debaters do try to explain why "pi" and "e" are important, but most of the debate is the two mathematicians heaping insults on each other in good fun.

It is mildly amusing, but don't spend money on it. Order it through interlibrary loan if you must. I have no idea if high school students would enjoy it or get any appreciation for math from it. That would be the only reason to buy it, and I would want to see the results of focus groups to see if it really has any appeal to that age group. (And high schoolers might like to watch people insult each other.)

BTW, Adams was the better insulter, even though Garrity's "e" won the vote.

Cheng, Eugenia. How to Bake Pi: an Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics. Basic Books, 2015.

Originally reviewed in 2017: Introduction to category theory for the general public

Eugenia Cheng's How to Bake Pi is an enjoyable (or enjoyable to me) tour of mathematical theory and an introduction to the field of category theory. She uses her interest in experimenting with cooking to provide mathematical analogies that the average reader can grasp and follow. Considering that category theory is difficult even for mathematicians to understand, this is quite an achievement. I am very comfortable with mathematics, so perhaps I am a bad judge for the average person, but I listened to the CD-Audio version of the book, and I could follow most of it. Nevertheless, I went back and read some sections in a paper version of the text, and the diagrams were helpful for a fuller understanding.

The text works through some simple mathematics as it tries to explore the different ways in which mathematicians can approach math. It then gives simple examples of category theory. The point is: just as traditional math simplifies situations so that one can reason about them, category theory allows one to simplify one's thinking about mathematics itself. The reader is not going to leave the book a practicing category theorist, but one should leave it with a sense of what category theory is trying to do.

I am sure that the commercial success of the book stems from the hope that it might inspire interest in young readers toward the rarified realm of very abstract mathematics and that it might motivate them to study mathematics itself. Because the author is female and uses analogies from a traditionally female field of interest, I could imagine that it might foster hope among educators that it will encourage more girls to study mathematics. I have no idea whether the book will actually encourage young people, female or male, to pursue mathematics, but it has as good a shot as any text in that direction. Focus groups are in order.

The book ends by trying to differentiate among knowledge, understanding, and belief. I am not sure that Cheng succeeds in making the more general philosophical point that knowledge and belief are connected to one another via the act of understanding, but she gives it a sporting try. I didn't really buy her closing argument, but I enjoyed the book as a whole and the weakness of the last chapter does not detract from the rest of the text.

Dunham, William. Euler: the Master of Us All. Mathematical Association of America, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Well written biography of Euler and and survey of his work

Dunham is well known for the clarity of his prose. This work is no exception. He chronicles the life of Leonard Euler with many details that would make the book enjoyable to even those who do not particularly care for mathematics. The math explained here can be enjoyed by a wide audience from early high schoolers to college students and the general public. This text would be a nice motivation for the high schooler who is good at algebra, but who has no reason to go beyond the problems assigned in the textbook. This book gives the reader a peek at an era when cutting-edge math was done in a more cavalier, romantic, and accessible fashion than today.

Note: There is a rule among popular science books that says: no math equations. This is not one of those books. If you are allergic to equations, you will not like this book (though it has plenty of stories of interest for those who choose to blip over all the equations.) As I have already said, the book's equations are not so complex that they are out of reach for the reader who did well in high school math classes.

A good read.

Gessen, Masha. Perfect Rigor: a Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Originally reviewed in 2013

Gessen creates a compelling narrative as she guides the lay reader skillfully through the world of Russian society and the eccentric genius of Grigori Perelman, the man who proved the Poincare conjecture.

Part of what makes Perelman's story interesting is the way in which he fits the mold of a Romantic genius, Romantic here meaning the philosophical and literary movement that began in the early 19th century. He is uncompromising and never politic. He is deeply insulted if one suspects him of having ulterior motives. He demands complete respect from people who do not know him. In this way, he ignores the fact that the world is full of people who claim to have accomplished things they have not. Because of that fact about the world, institutions have checks to force people to prove themselves, even if such proof is demeaning. To be given high social esteem, one must often submit to a lengthy process of paying one's dues, which Perelman has refused to do.

When a person is great and brooks no petty accommodation to human society, the person inspires loyalty. In terms of evolutionary psychology, acting strategically can be a bad long-term strategy, because others recognize one's ulterior motives to get ahead socially. The admiration of mad genius is similar to the rational, game-theoretical success of irrational behavior. Within Perelman's own world, his actions have a logical consistency and dignity, but in the broader context, they are irrational. But in many situations, such irrational behavior succeeds.

The most heavily "liked" review of this book on Amazon slams Gessen's efforts to diagnose Perelman with a mental condition. The reviewer's point: Perelman simply has high standards, not a disease. But that reviewer overlooks the fact that such uncompromising principle is apocalyptic in nature: it is done without regard for how it sets up one's future relations with other people, as if there were no tomorrow. Perelman is like a religious prophet: rigorous to the point of being suicidal. And he is more like an Old Testament prophet: he is unforgiving. Because representatives from Princeton once insulted him by offering him only an untenured position, he refuses to consider their later offer of a tenured position. Take that, Princeton.

I think most people would consider Perelman's uncompromising state to be a madness, however much they might see it as a divine madness. We respect someone such as Lincoln or Roosevelt who can hold onto greater principles all the while playing the political game successfully, but we worship someone who refused to play the game and was nailed up on a cross.

Gessen fulfills one aspect of the broader social recognition of the genius. She tells his story for him. And that task she has accomplished fully. Her final chapter, in which she points out that Perelman's behavior generally conforms to Asperger syndrome, offends some readers, because it offers a rational explanation for his otherwise uncompromising purity, because it disturbs the Romantic narrative arc in which Perelman is "in the world" but not "of the world." By diagnosing him, Gessen returns his behavior to being "of the world." But even the Asperger or autistic diagnosis today is celebrated as a Romantic type in contemporary culture.

Goldsmith, Barbara. Obsessive Genius: the Inner World of Marie Curie. Norton, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Curie primarily as mother, then as scientist

This text is a well-written, current biography of the famed scientist Marie Curie. Goldsmith writes as a woman trying to investigate how Curie balanced traditional female roles (mother, wife) with her life as a scientist. The details of the science take a backseat to the social relations. One edition of the book is designed for book clubs, with prompting questions in the back.

Goldsmith portrays Curie as a fairly neglectful mother. Not surprisingly, science came first. Fortunately for her children, Curie's mother-in-law and father-in-law were understanding and willing to step in and raise the children.

The book opens with Marie's girlhood in Poland as Maria Sklodowska. Her parents were Polish patriots in the part of Poland under Russian control. The Russians would have none of Polish cultural education, so her parents had to maintain their culture clandestinely. As a late teen, she was the governess for a wealthy family, and when she fell in love with the eldest son, she was dismissed.

Determined, she moved to France where she could pursue a university degree. Pierre was a genial son of a moderately respectable and well-to-do French family. He had a flair for invention and would often solve practical problems with their equipment. Marie was the primary driver of the theoretical and scientific parts of their projects. The French at the time supported Polish nationalism, so Curie enjoyed French sympathy in part due to her Polish nationality.

Curie's story includes male allies. Though there was a prevailing culture of sexism in Europe at the time, a number of male physicists, especially Ernest Rutherford, supported women's rights. Rutherford procured supplies for the Curies and provided access to scientific journals.

Marie's male allies included her husband and their scientific partner. When the Curies and Becquerel won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Marie was not allowed to speak. As a consequence, both Pierre and Becquerel praised her work thoroughly in their own speeches. Because of her fame as a scientist, she became a public figure.

Marie Curie had an amazing tolerance for radiation. She lived for decades after Pierre and had to do a great deal of heavy work in order to refine and isolate radioactive elements. After Pierre's death, she scandalized polite society by having a sexual relationship with a married former student of her husband's.

Marie was a strong-willed woman who bravely defied the conventions and expectations of her day. She was not afraid to assert herself sexually or to neglect her children in favor of her calling.

Harris, Judith Rich. No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. Norton, 2006.

Originally reviewed in 2012

I liked this book, both for its ideas about personality and for its approach to the practice of science.

Caveat: I did not read The Nurture Assumption, so some of the critical reviews on Amazon did not speak to me. They complained that the first half of the book was rehash from The Nurture Assumption. I wouldn't know. But I did like the clear way in which she showed that other researchers in the field are neglecting to control for genetics and context, to their detriment. Yes, she bashes her detractors a bit too much, but it is important to know that she is being rejected by many in the field for bad reasons.

I agree with some Amazon reviews that her ultimate explanation for why even identical twins can have very different personalities is a bit of a disappointment. But she does an excellent job of eliminating candidate hypotheses that the evidence does not support. And sometimes the correct answer is not the most exciting one.

I also like the fact that she admits that her theory could be replaced easily by further refinements. What she lacks in terms of seeing trees she more than makes up for in understanding the shape of the forest. She also does a good job showing why peer-reviewed journal articles are important to the advancement of knowledge. I have read that section to classes of college students.

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: an Intimate History. Scribner, 2016.

Originally reviewed in 2023

Mukherjee offers a history of the concept of the biological gene. He reflects on the social implications of the concept. He brings the story up to about 2016. In the later part, he raises the ethical issues around experimentation with altering genes in the human germ line.

The first half of the book features Darwin and Mendel, then Oswald Avery and French biologists such as Francois Monod, then Crick, Watson, and Franklin, etc. This is a fairly standard history. I have read many books in this field. Mukherjee does not leave anything major out, but he doesn't add anything particularly new. If you already know this story thoroughly, you can skip this part of the book.

The second half of the book covers recent developments in genetic and genomic technology and science. Mukherjee describes the race to decode "the blueprint" of the human genome. (By the way, the complete human genome from telomere to telomere wasn't fully decoded until 2022.) He also goes into great depth about the possibilities of gene editing. The book was apparently finished in 2016, which was just before a Chinese researcher announced that he had inserted a gene edit into the germ line of human embryos that then developed into infants. Nevertheless, Mukherjee explores the ethical issues surrounding that possible breakthrough.

Raymo, Chet. The Soul of the Night: an Astronomical Pilgrimage. Prentice-Hall, 1985.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Poetry of Science

Raymo teaches astronomy at a New England college. He also writes for the Boston Globe. This collection of essays is superb. He writes with lush detail, meditating on the spiritual and the scientific. The butterfly dying on his windshield comes from atoms formed by supernovae.

My favorite essay compares light and matter. Referring to Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Raymo compares light to Ariel; mass is compared to Calaban. He then explains how Einstein and Louis de Broglie showed that all matter has a wave nature, just as light does. Raymo ends the essay thus: "Calaban has taken off his mask, and he is Ariel." Science writing doesn't get better.

Roach, Mary. Spook: Science tackles the Afterlife. Norton, 2005.

Originally 2011: Smart-aleck investigates the paranormal

Mary Roach has made a name for herself as a science humor writer. That is to say, she writes breezy and very funny prose about non-fiction topics that are largely scientific in nature. She always walks a narrow path between outright ridicule and light-hearted celebration of the efforts of those she describes. She is in this respect like Sarah Vowell, who wise-cracks her way through history.

In this book, Roach chronicles those researchers who try to seriously investigate the claims of the paranormal. She goes to India to meet with researchers investigating claims of reincarnation. Then she discusses the history of psychic mediums (media?). She even goes to an institute to be trained as a medium. She meets with medical researchers who are trying to detect the weight of the soul. She describes studies that try to prove whether or not people who have had near-death experiences really do leave their bodies, or whether they just think they have.

She carefully points out why it is highly likely that all of these phenomena have naturalistic explanations, and she basically makes fun of most of the researchers. The jokes and wise-cracks are quite funny. Surprisingly, she ends the book not entirely convinced that there isn't something to the claims about the afterlife. She makes it clear, though, that there has never been solid evidence in favor of such claims.

I listened to the audio version, and the actress who read the book hammed up the dialogue a bit too much. Also, too many tracks per CD.

Sacks, Oliver. The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. Summit, 1985.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Parables of Neurology

I have read several Oliver Sacks books, and I have liked them all. Though this was his fourth book, it was his first book that did not focus on a single topic. Instead, it is a miscellany of neurological cases. Some of these essays are excellent, some can be long-winded. This book has more digressions into the scholarly literature and more footnotes than his later, more consistently popular works.

Nevertheless, Sacks does not describe the brain's functions systematically, so this book and his others are not textbooks. He also does not describe cutting edge science. The book was written in about 1970. His interests are driven by individual cases. He then conducts literature reviews after the case is in front of him. So it is a very human-centered form of science writing.

My book club read this book many years ago. I enjoy reading science, so I was not put off by the topics or the footnotes. Others were. They also felt that there was an element of the freak show to the essays: that Sacks was profiting from the morbid curiosity of his readers. I disagreed, though I concede some of their points. One Amazon reviewer said that these stories are moral parables. I think that is quite accurate. Sacks seems driven by a humanist curiosity: what makes us human? In "The Lost Mariner", he asks, does he have a soul? In the essay "Murder," one feels that the patient's mental condition is as close to a just God's purgatory as one could get. "A Passage to India" feels like a journey to a place beyond death.

I sometimes read the parts of a book out of the strict order of the text. For this book, I read the first essay, then the last, then the second essay, then the second to the last, etc. That turned out to be a good order. Some of the last essays in the book are not the most emotionally rewarding. I ended up reading "A Passage to India" last, and I would recommend that ordering to other readers.

Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't. New York : Penguin Press, 2012.

Originally written in 2012: Forecasters, how to be less wrong with Bayes

Silver has the knack for turning to a good story to illustrate his points, so the book is entertaining as it guides the reader to some profound points about predicting the future. The ideas and the delivery are both solid and well done.

Nate Silver's basic thesis is that, especially for forecasting, Bayesian statistical models should be used rather than Fisherian or frequentist models. R. A. Fisher campaigned against Bayesian statistics, because using Bayes you introduces your biases into the model explicitly. Fisher wanted to make statistics objective, without the biases of the researcher intruding. The problem is that, especially in forecasting, the researcher builds biases into the model regardless. If the biases are explicit, then at least you cannot fool yourself into thinking they are not there.

As far as the structure of the book, you can generally skip a chapter if the topic does not interest you. If you read the last six pages or so of each chapter, you will get the relevant points of the chapter for Silver's overall thesis. To me, the important chapters for the thesis are chapters 5 (overfitting data) and chapter 8 (on Bayes). The chapters on economic and political forecasting very good. I skipped the chapters on baseball and poker, and I don't regret that. I think you could easily skip the chapter on chess, unless you are partial to chess.

Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Crown, 2010.

Originally reviewed in 2012

This book delves into the science, technology, economics, social impact, and ethics around biomedical research. I recommend it as an assignment for advanced high school students or beginning college students, because a student could write about many different subjects after reading it. And it is a good read, IMHO.

In an interview, Rebecca Skloot mentioned that she had spent a great deal of time rearranging the different threads of the narrative so that it flowed smoothly. She succeeded. Planning was needed to tell many different stories at the same time, and they all fit together without being confusing or boring.

First, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, who had the misfortune of getting a very aggressive cervical cancer when she still had small children. She grew up as a poor black daughter of Virginia sharecroppers. She married a cousin and moved to Baltimore, where her husband worked in the steel mill during World War II.

Skloot tells that the historical person named Johns Hopkins had been an abolitionist, and when he gave money for a medical school and hospital, he required that the poor should be treated for free and that blacks could not be barred from receiving treatment. The doctors at Johns Hopkins did not hesitate to use their charity patients as test subjects in research, and Henrietta was one of those charity cases.

As was true of many other patients, a sample of Henrietta's tumor was removed by doctors and studied in the lab. Before her sample, no other human cells had ever successfully replicated outside the human body. Her cells, however, became the first human cell line that could replicate outside of the human body. They were named HeLa, and HeLa cells were critical for medical research in the second half of the 20th century.

At the same time, Skoot tells the story of George Guy, the researcher at Johns Hopkins Medical School who managed to keep Henrietta's tumor cells alive and replicating. He kept spending his own money to get equipment for his lab, and he gave the replicating cells away free to other researchers. Eventually, biological supply companies started up, and they took on the task of replicating and supplying HeLa cells. Those companies ultimately make billions of dollars supplying Henrietta's cells and their mutated descendants to researchers, but neither Guy nor Hopkins saw any of that money.

Skloot also tells the story of how Henrietta's children gradually learned that part of their mother was still alive, and that the cells from her cancer had made a major contribution to modern medicine. Unfortunately, those relatives were uneducated about science, and they misunderstood the researchers who were communicating with them. They thought that their mother was being kept alive, perhaps in a coma, and being experimented on by unethical doctors.

No one before Skloot bothered to figure out what the family understood about medicine. No one tried to explain clearly to them what it means for her cancer cells to be alive and replicating. Only after many years of confusion, anger, worry, and stress does someone explain these facts and give two of her children a tour of a facility that stores HeLa cells.

The author also tells the story of black/white relations in Baltimore and rural Virginia. The central character of the book arises here: Deborah, Henrietta's daughter. After Henrietta's death, her children are mistreated by their stepmother and other relatives, and they lead a hard life with no small measure of misfortune.

Skloot further recounts the history of the development of informed consent in human subjects research in the United States. When Henrietta died, informed consent was not required. Today, the protections of institutional review boards are strong. The first American doctors to refuse to experiment on patients without their knowledge or consent were Jewish doctors keenly aware of the history of Nazi medical experiments in death camps. The United States had signed the Nuremburg code of ethics in medical research but had never implemented it into law until after these protests by conscientious doctors began.

Another story that is woven in among the rest is the story of the growth of the biotech industrial complex. The laws surrounding this industry and its claims to intellectual property did not exist when Henrietta Lacks died, and Skloot tells of the evolution of the legal framework governing this industry through the court cases where patients tried to assert their rights to their own body parts, and the complex situations that have developed from those precedents. One irony of the current situation: almost everyone involved in the system of using biological materials can make money except the patient from whom the material is taken.

The final story is Skloot's own: how she came to be obsessed with this story, and the difficult years she spent piecing it together and working with the Lacks family. In an interview, she said that at first she did not want to have herself in the book, but it became necessary, because she became one of the agents in straightening out the decades of misunderstanding that plagued Henrietta's story. Skloot decided to donate the proceeds from the book to an educational fund to benefit the Lacks family.

Skloot does a masterful job of controlling the emotional response of the reader to keep them reading. The audio version of the book is also well-produced, and it ends with an interview with the author.

Post-script 2023: This book was selected as the Common Book at Winona State University around 2017. Some WSU scholars were critical of the style of the book because it falls into the "white savior" pattern: the smart white person saves these not-too-bright African Americans. Point well taken. However, that is actually what happened in this case. Persons with privilege can use that privilege to ally themselves with those without privilege. The story is compelling, and it opens many avenues for discussion related to science, economics, ethics, etc.

Further: it was recently announced that the Lacks family successfully sued some of the biotech companies that had made money by supplying the industry with the HeLa cell line. I don't know the details of the case. It strikes me that there could be a problem of post-facto imposition of laws to a situation that preceded the passage of those laws. Nevertheless, one does feel a sense of justice for the family, as some of the accidental value created by the cell line of one of their family members finally accrued to them.

Behe, Michael. Darwin's Black Box. Free Press, 1996.

This book is the best written and most accessible of the works of the Intelligent Design movement of post-1986 creationism. Behe is one of the few members of ID that has a PhD in the biological sciences, so he is looked to by others for the technical details. That having been said, it is still creationism; it still fails as science.

He claims that, at the sub-cellular level, there is so much complexity that it could not possibly have evolved. He is a one-note Charlie, repeating the refrain for "irreducible complexity" with many examples of what he says are structures that are irreducibly complex. He brackets technical discussion so that the faint of heart can skip them. His writing is gentle and friendly, and he portrays himself as a reasonable, beer-drinking suburbanite, as contrasted (not explicitly) with those tightly wound evangelical preachers one would normally associate with creationism.

Some excellent criticisms of Behe can be found in the writings of Robert Pennock and Ken Miller. Pennock's "Tower of Babel" demolishes some of his basic reasoning and also shows how some of his analogies are misleading and false. In the collection called "Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics," the essays by Brauer and Brumbaugh and Pennock are relevant. Ken Miller's web site has good criticisms of Behe, including a text that explains an evolutionary pathway for the motor-like flagellum.

One of the core philosophical criticisms is that in order to claim that a structure is irreducibly complex, you have to state its function. You must say, "X is irreducible with regard to function Y." If one can show that nearly the same structure had different functions in likely ancestors, the claim to irreducibility is shattered. Behe shines a narrow beam onto some cellular structures. If he had turned on the overhead light so that the reader could see the complexity in its context, the claim to "irreducible complexity" would disappear.

Update in 2022: I have long since stopped following the latest publications in the evolution / creationism argument. However, I do recall that when I was reading this Behe book, I had recently studied computer science. Behe's complaint that changing one thing will break the machinery of the cell, if it were true, would not only prove the impossibility of evolution, it would prove the impossibility of sexual reproduction. Behe's question was: how could one point mutation change the cell without breaking it? The answer can come from computer science. Certain places in the source code can be arbitrarily changed to change the behavior of the computer without breaking the code. Most changes will break the code, but some can allow for the evolution of the program.

Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Memetics as a science is still dead

Several years ago, Richard Dawkins came to Winona State University for a lecture. Afterward, I asked him how he would respond to the attack on memes by Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works. Dawkins deflected the question and simply referred me to this book by Blackmore.

What I found in this book was unconvincing. Ms. Blackmore proposes that the human mind is simply a fertile eco-system for mental organisms, memes, to live and compete. The conceit that she, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others work from is this: an idea behaves something like a gene. They claim that memes function like genes, and that memes can evolve, reproduce, spread, and become extinct.

One serious problem with the analogy between genes and thoughts is that genes are replicated by chemical machinery which is normally very highly accurate in its reproduction. Genes therefore change very slowly. Memes, on the other hand, can change very quickly, as an individual makes up a variation of an idea. And the replication is highly unreliable, as anyone who has played the game Telephone can attest.

Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, has even harsher criticism. He argues that having ideas compete and evolve in the human mind and the human social network would take too much time and would be selected against by the natural evolution of actual genes.

Blackmore's book is a brief, readable, and spirited attempt to argue the case for memes. In my opinion, she doesn't overcome the strong, valid criticism against memes, nor does she present evidence that would support memes, but exclude other theories of the mind. Memetics as a science is still dead.

Carroll, Sean B. Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom. Norton, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2007: Classic of popular biology

This book is widely considered (in 2007) to be the best popular science exposition of the growing science of evolutionary developmental biology, or "evo devo." For anyone who wants to be current on recent biological science and its implications for how we view species and evolution, this is the book. Carroll has, according to reviewers, been a leader in advancing the discipline, and he writes well. I fully recommend it. It is much more digestible and current than the previous landmark of evo devo, Rudolf Raff's Shape of Life.

One of the critical lessons of the book is that the tags that precede a gene that bind with proteins that either promote or suppress the gene create an elaborate logic of gene expression. This logical structure tells the cell when to turn the gene on and when to turn it off. Because these binding sites can be as short as six nucleotides, small genetic mutations in the binding sites can have major phenotypic expressions.

One consequence of this fact is that one of the favorite intelligent design arguments becomes void. ID proponents (such as Michael Behe) claim that genes are so complex and irreducible that small mutations couldn't possibly drive macroevolution. However, if much of morphology is driven by short logic tags surrounding the gene proper, then single point mutations within the logical structure can have a huge effect.

Another consequence of this fact is that when one is decoding a genome, it is not enough to decode the genes. The non-gene filler contains critical logical switches that tell the organism when to express the gene. Therefore, the Craig Venter effort to kill the government's Human Genome Project was very misguided, as his technique did a poorer job of reading the noncoding regions accurately. This also explains why two species such as humans and chimps can share 98% of their genes and yet be morphologically and behaviorally quite different.

These consequences are huge, and the readable examples and explanations help drive them into the consciousness of the lay reader. This book ranks up there with any of the works of Stephen Jay Gould. Excellently done.

Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press, 2009.

Originally reviewed in 2016: Excellent overview of evidence for evolution over creationism

Unlike Dawkins' other books, this book is aimed at laying out the argument for the truth of evolution, addressing possible creationist doubters of evolution and the geological record. Basically, this book does a good job of laying out the evidence, and it goes systematically through a great deal of evidence. Dawkins' other books had assumed that the audience accepted the truth of evolution by natural selection and the antiquity of the fossil record. This book is Dawkins contribution to the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. Below, I will go through a detailed survey of the content, but my points should not be seen as detracting from my highest rating. I think this book is better than many other books on this topic.

One major linguistic confusion that creationists exploit in debates is a confusion with the word "theory," as in the "Theory of Evolution." The scientific community uses the word theory to mean "a well-verified conceptual framework for explaining scientific data." Creationists exploit another definition of the word, where it is used as "a synonym for an unverified hypothesis," to make it seem that the theory of evolution is merely a guess. Early in the book, Dawkins deals with the ambiguity by making up a new word, "theorum" to mean a well-verified scientific framework, as scientists use the word, and he only uses the word "hypothesis" for the non-scientific meaning of theory. I find this construction clumsy, and he only uses it in the opening chapters.

After the unfortunate theorum, Dawkins compares artificial and natural selection. He argues that some instances of natural selection amount to mutual semi-artificial selection between two different species, with each breeding the desired characteristics in the other. Next, he tackles questions of assigning an age to the earth itself and fossils. He starts with using tree rings (dendrochronology) to show how one can have multiple mutually calibrated time rulers. Next, the discussion turns to several examples where evolution was observed in real time, such as Lenski's experiments with bacteria in a glucose and citrate environment, and Endler's experiments with guppies in both lab and wild settings.

Next, Dawkins discusses the fossil record and the logical absurdity of more evidence meaning more gaps. He sees the pernicious effect of the concept of the great chain of being. Animals have more "primitive" traits if they have retained the same version as the common ancestor. Then, he discusses the fossils that show the original vertebrate transition from sea to land, especially Tiktaalik roseae, followed by a discussion of the return to the sea by whales and manatees. He does not mention Carl Zimmer's At the Water's Edge, a book which I also recommend. Dawkins discusses human fossils, with an emphasis on skulls whose genus and species are disputed. Creationists criticize the ambivalence, but that only means that they are intermediates.

Next, Dawkins deals with embryology. How do genes make bodies? Through embryos. DNA is not a blueprint: there is no one-to-one correspondence between a section of DNA and a part of the body. Instead, an algorithm for self-assembly. After discarding several analogies, Dawkins settles on "auto-origami" to describe the process. He goes on to discuss how "switch genes" (ex. HOX genes) orchestrate the behavior of each cell in the embryo to get the cells to follow their bottom-up behavior in creating the body.

Note here that Dawkins is still very gene-centric. He does not go into a detailed explanation of the short binding sites in the DNA that surround the section of DNA that actually codes for the gene. Sean Carroll in Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Kirschner and Gerhart in The Plausibility of Life explain that these binding sites, which either promote or suppress the expression of the nearby gene, have a major impact on phenotypic variation. Dawkins has always bowed down before the selfish gene, and he does not seem to have embraced the new findings from evo devo that reduce the importance of the gene itself in phenotypic expression. Dawkins does agree with Carroll and Kirschner and Gerhart that the driving force within embryo development is grassroots in nature, but he is still too gene-centric. Dawkins also does not emphasize enough that the HOX compartments within the developing embryo allow for the rapid evolution of changes within that specific compartment, as explained by Kirschner and Gerhart. Though this is an introduction to evolution, defending it against creationism, the points by Carroll and Kirschner and Gerhart are really worth discussing. Those points make the idea of life via natural processes more plausible.

Dawkins discusses genetic islands and speciation. Dawkins then goes over the insurmountable problems that creationists face trying to explain the patterns of biogeography through a hypothesis that all species started on Mount Ararat after Noah's flood. He rounds out this section discussing plate tectonics. What is interesting about plate tectonics is that young-earth creationists are willing to allow that it is true; they just believe that South America separated from Africa during the forty days of Noah's flood. Dawkins argues that there is more evidence for evolution than for plate tectonics.

Next, Dawkins discusses homologies. He claims that evolution has no need to use fossils to defend it. He reviews the mammalian skeleton as manifest in bats, horses, etc. Dawkins then discusses genetic homologies. He points out that because you can compare the same gene in many different animals, you can construct a tree of life for each separate gene. The different trees should agree with one another, allowing for minor statistical variation. Also, the genetic distance from human to dog should be statistically about the same as the distance from monkey or lemur to dog. Any violations would be evidence against evolution. But the data strongly support evolution.

Dawkins discusses many instances of anatomy that demonstrate that animals were not intelligently designed. There are many examples of post-hoc tinkering, where a major change caused many problems and where those problems were fixed by slapdash tinkering by natural selection. Dawkins compares the tinkering of evolution to the handling of the Hubble Space Telescope. Once the telescope was in space, we could only build work-arounds to its problems, like the corrective optics. We couldn't just replace the main mirror with an improved one.

Dawkins compares an ecosystem that an Intelligent Designer would have planned to an ecosystem that has evolved. For example, a designed orchard would keep trees short. An evolved forest will have an arms race of height. If a designer crafted animals, he crafted cheetahs to be maximal gazelle-killers, and he designed gazelles to be maximal cheetah-fleers. Which side is he on? Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Dawkins discusses evolutionary theodicy (justice of God) and the existence of pain: moral philosophy puts a value on minimizing suffering. The devil's chaplain could write on the cruelty of nature. Dawkins investigates why there is no evolutionary value in having a cognitive system that did not cause great pain.

Finally, Dawkins takes each sentence from the final paragraph of Origin of Species. He claims the mention of a creator was a sop that Darwin threw to critics and later regretted. Dawkins defines life in terms of information storage and types of memory. He views culture as a form of life's memory. He then speculates about whether life on Earth only started once (likely), and what the likelihood is for life elsewhere. He discusses the confusion creationists have with entropy, and states, "Natural selection is an improbability pump." He then explains the reasons why some favor RNA as the original replicating molecule.

In the appendix, he reviews the statistics on the percentages of the public in various countries that believe in young earth creationism, intelligent design, and evolution by natural selection alone. The anti-evolution public in Britain is growing, especially in the Muslim community.

The audio CD version has both Dawkins and his wife, Lalla, alternatively reading sections of the book. However, if the listener has any visual abilities at all, one might want to check out a paper copy of the book from the library even if one is listening to the audio, because there are about 100 illustrations that are referred to in the text.

Basically, well done and entertaining. One of Dawkins' better books.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Manifesto of metaphical Darwinism, great though flawed

This book could be called the philosophical manifesto of the metaphysical Darwinian fundamentalists, or perhaps, the New Atheists. It is packed with ideas, some of which are brilliant, and some not so brilliant. It is important to remember that this is a work of philosophy rather than science. It is an important work to read, even though it is likely to energize creationists as much as it would its own supporters. Dennett is an unabashed metaphysical naturalist, which distinguishes him from such critics of creationism as Robert Pennock, who believes that science is restricted to methodological naturalism. Dennett also later became identified as a New Atheist.

The book is divided into three parts: philosophical Darwinism, Darwinian thinking within biology, and a Darwinian memetic theory of the mind. The first two parts have powerful and useful ideas; the memetics of the third part is weak, even though Dennett may care about that portion most strongly.

Part One

In part one, Dennett presents a pyramid of orderliness proposed by Locke, with God at top and chaos at bottom. He then describes natural selection as a Universal Acid that transcends biology and can operate from metaphysics and cosmology to thought. Natural selection allows the flow of order to move in reverse: from Chaos to Order to Design to consciousness and thoughts of the infinite.

While I don't share Dennett's uncompromising metaphysical naturalism, I like many of the ideas he presents. Whether or not the pyramid is truly inverted, Darwin's demonstration that you can get organic Design from Order and Time does prove Locke wrong: such an inversion is conceivable. Whether it is True, it is nonetheless conceivable. This book has the clearest exposition of that thinking that I have read, and it shows why religious fundamentalists might view evolution with such loathing (beyond the issue of Genesis disagreeing with the geological record).

I like Dennett's explanation of natural selection as an algorithm that is not guaranteed to produce a specific outcome. To me, it makes sense that substrate-neutrality allowed Darwin to get evolution right without knowing the mechanisms that produced it. I like Dennett's ideas about Design, such as how you unscramble an egg. He does a nice job of showing where scientific concepts and philosophical concepts connect and inform each other.

Dennett describes a Library of Babel, which contains all possible texts. It helps visualize the enormous size of design space. As a librarian, I appreciated how the Library of Babel pulls Library and Information Science into the continuum of other sciences and rational thought. I agree that you could come up with a DNA coding scheme for the Roman alphabet and code all of Babel into DNA sequences, but I disagree with Dennett's claim that the Library of Mendel contains the Library of Babel because it contains our DNA, and we are capable of generating items for the Library of Babel. In the same sense, I disagree that modern human culture is really part of the extended phenotype of homo sapiens. To me, that claim is too reductionistic: it seems to imply that we are hard-wired for written language and the wheel. We may be hardwired for spoken language, but, to me, the details of culture are emergent phenomena.

Dennett well compares the detection of plagiarism to the detection of biological homologies. He contrasts art and science. A scientific discovery has the air of inevitability (Pasteur even told his students to make their results seem inevitable), while an artwork is fundamentally not inevitable. The Unity of Design Space is a puzzler for me. As I have said, if it means that all human artifacts and ideas are coded in our DNA, then I disagree with it. I think that it merely says that there is a genealogy of designed things: in order to have intelligent design, you first have to evolve intelligent agents to design. If that is Dennett's claim, then that was implied by the inverted pyramid, and he could have cut the long wind.

Part Two

I like Dennett's argument that "biology is engineering" albeit a non-human kind of engineering. I like the idea that biological structures develop by an interplay between historical accident and "the 'discovery' of important truths." I like Dennett's section on reverse engineering, the section on artifact hermeneutics and biology, his revision of the Panglossian paradigm into the Leibnizian paradigm, and his idea for measuring design: "by comparing the cost of making predictions from the lowest-level physical stance ... with the cost of making predictions from the higher stances: the design stance and the intentional stance," (p. 237). At a cocktail party, I rolled out this bon mot to great effect: "Biology is the hermeneutics of designedness."

As to his critique of Stephen Jay Gould, it centers on Dennett's point that if you don't start with the hypothesis that the design should be there for a reason, you can't analyze functions at all. Dennett's critique of Eldredge's example of horseshoe crabs comes to mind. Unless we hypothesize that the Jurassic species actually used their legs and tried to get optimal performance out of their legs, we can't really hypothesize about why they were that long, and why they are now shorter.

I have a friend who was a biology professor specializing in the ecology of spiders. We are both Gould fans. When I summarized Dennett's critique of Gould, she readily agreed and said that while Gould saves his specific criticism for shoddy adaptation stories, his rhetoric makes it sound as though all adaptational hypotheses are to be avoided, which would nearly grind the field to a halt. For example, Lynn Margulis, using Gould's framework, once criticized my friend's research as being too adaptationist. But she would have no questions to test if she did not begin with adaptation assumptions about optimality. Again, Margulis manages to stay within the realm of science in her own writings, but her rhetorical flourishes encourage a group of new age Gaia fans to bash biological research in general.

SIDEBAR: The above notwithstanding, I still love Gould. Gould delights in pointing out that the adaptive stories we concoct often come from our cultural wishful thinking, and that other explanations are available—that a feature might be a non-functional by-product of some other adaptation, that the range of possible adaptations is often limited by the developmental channel that the species is in, that the feature was adapted to a previous mode of existence and is now useless, etc. I find Gould a healthy corrective to the knee-jerk idea that a feature must be optimally adapted for the current organism. Also, I like his keen (well, to me keen) sense that what is appropriate for DNA is not okay for humans—his antipathy toward Social Darwinism. Finally, I love his habit of showing that older thinkers out of style were doing sensible things, William Jennings Bryan for example.

However, I think that Dennett's critique of the Spandrels is on the money, as is the critique of the attitude that the Spandrels article has created. Rampant adaptation stories are bad. But they take place against a background of adaptation thinking, some of which is necessary, testable, and well-reasoned.

Part Three

Part three of Dennett's book is the worst, IMHO. In it, he articulates a theory of memetics, where ideas, or "memes," compete against each other in the environment of the human mind and culture to produce our thoughts and consciousness. This very radical view creates problems for his entire project.

To see the problem, compare his views here with Steven Pinker's ideas. To Pinker, the human mind is a product of evolutionary design whose function is the processing of ideas. Allowing ideas to bump around and evolve in your brain and social circle would take a long time, time that you don't have. One thing good about Pinker's position is that he can argue that human minds do strive toward Truth, even if it is a Herbert Simon type of bounded rationality. You can really care about the veracity of ideas, and not just their utility in a competition with other ideas. He can then defend his own project of seeking the true condition of the mind and human nature. He can say, hey look, I am just seeking the Truth like other thinkers before me.

Dennett's position is fundamentally awkward. He sees all ideas as memes competing in meme design space for more mental territory. Truth is peripheral to the success of an idea. Our minds are a mafia of computer viruses that either let in other ideas that they like, or are infiltrated by unfriendly ones they cannot stop. His claim that biological evolution is True and that all Design is from the bottom up slips around on philosophical relativism. If all ideas are selfish memes, then there is no Truth, even limited truth.

Within Dennett's theory of the mind, Dennett's own ideas about natural selection may or may not be near the truth of the situation. It doesn't matter. Their reproductive success is all that counts. One could argue that according to Dennett, there is no reason to listen to Dennett. If it gets you anywhere, it won't necessarily be because it successfully explains reality. But paradoxically, that would only be the case if his ideas were true. If his ideas are true, then his ideas would be very complicated mental organisms that want to squat in your mind like all the other ideas of the world, but they would, by happenstance, be true ones. For a philosopher, he has painted himself into quite a philosophical corner.

Dennett would argue that he has found meaning rising up from below: no taking without mistaking, no easy point to divide intentional design from non-intentional order, etc. That's fine. He assumes a constant truth in the world in that the physical laws stay the same in any one universe for its duration and provide a context for evolution of order, design, meaning and thought. That's fine. But by claiming that all ideas are selected for reasons other than their truth value, he calls his whole programme into question. His whole book could be just another pick-up line in the single's bar of thought.

SIDEBAR: One tee-shirt that I find very amusing has an underwater scene. One creature was labelled "Darwinism." A virile shark had the creature in its teeth. That shark was labelled "Christianity." The image was entitled: "Survival of the fittest." The upshot is that the wearer was claiming that Christianity (his version) would triumph over Darwinism, not because Darwinism was false, but precisely because a natural selection of memes was true. Christianity wins because Darwinism is true. The unintended irony is palpable.

Just as Pinker dispatched the fear of Newspeak in his Language Instinct, he dispatches this radically relativistic memology in How the Mind Works with a ray of hope that, even if truth for him does not come from either the God of Israel or the God of Aristotle, there at least is a Truth for one to seek. He brings it back to Darwin's original philosophical observation: there is a pre-existence of the soul, but for "pre-existence," read "monkeys."

Dennett had read Pinker's earlier work, and toward the end of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett specifically challenges Pinker's theory of the mind, without naming him directly. When you look at the scientific work that Pinker draws on for his theory, versus Dennett's more vague handwaving, I think that Pinker carries the day. And the implications of Pinker's work strongly limit Dennett's fond wishes for memetics. Dennett knows this, and disagrees with Pinker as to the extent to which structures in the brain constrain how and what we think. For an author of books about consciousness, Dennett's concept of the mind is quite simplistic.

In the review in the journal Evolution, Allen Orr points out that Dennett really wants to make memetics a science like genetics, but that the nature of memes, or information in the mental/cultural sphere effectively prevents that sort of science of genealogy. Dennett admits as much at the end of his memetics chapter. This gives his own work, where he himself has invested so much of his effort, an anticlimax.

Dennett's extreme suggestions for religion at the end of the book stem as much from his metaphysical naturalism as from his memetics. It only helps fan extremism for both supporters and opponents. One has to keep in mind that he is a philosopher more than a scientist. It only makes the third section more unfortunate, even though that seems to be where his heart is.

All in all: an important though flawed and very human book.

Depew, David J., and Bruce H. Weber. Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. MIT Press, 1995.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Very good scholarly text on history and philosophy of science

"Darwinism Evolving" is an exploration of the changing nature of a scientific discipline, or, as some philosophers of science like to call it, a research programme. The theory of biological evolution by natural selection is an especially good case study, first, because the theory has had radical revisions over the course of its existence. It is also a good topic because it is a focal point of hostility by some who question scientific methods for religious reasons. Darwinism is a good entry point for the student to learn more about the nature of science and its relationship to the rest of human society, in part because the whiff of controversy keeps the reader's attention.

The book is a scholarly text. It is long and complex. It is not an easy-going, Stephen Jay Gould-style essay. However, it is not poorly written, and it holds the reader's interest. For those motivated to learn more about the history of evolutionary theory and the history of science in general, I recommend it. It recognizes and discusses ideas from the more radical "Science Studies" postmodern critique of science, but its thesis is not from that radical community. The authors point out where those science studies ideas are useful, and where they go too far.

Darwin, as is well known, argued for the existence of natural selection without even having an exact understanding of how heredity worked. Nevertheless, he put forward such a robust theory that it has survived and flourished. And his original vision was strong enough that later theorists have regularly gone back to his original theory. His Origin of Species is still one of the most persuasive arguments for the theory.

This book describes the earlier theories of natural history and shows the context of the original theory. It then studies Darwin's theory itself and its reception by the British society. Darwin's original theory rested on a philosophy of science derived from Newton.

Next, the authors explore the developmental programme of Ernst Haeckel, the German biologist who promoted evolution, and the scientists who rediscovered Mendel's genetics. Depew and Weber show repeatedly that many of the advances in the theory came from thinkers who were trying to disprove it. (Sidenote: similarly, Albert Einstein strengthened and enriched the theory of quantum mechanics by trying to disprove it.) They explore how other scientific disciplines migrated from a philosophical grounding in Newton to a statistical grounding in the ideas of Ludwig Boltzmann. Ronald Fisher likewise transformed Darwinism from a Newtonian model into a statistical science. Theodore Dobzhansky turned Fisher's statistics into a model based on geographical populations.

The book then shows how molecular studies again transformed the theoretical underpinning of biological evolution. Darwinists had to accommodate the evidence for genetic drift. The book ends with a lengthy discussion of the theory of non-linear dynamics which again has offered an alternative to the standard context of evolution. While other writers have moved the discussion beyond non-linear dynamics to the modern interest in evolutionary developmental genetics (for example, Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful), this book is still a very good exploration of the history of Darwinism and its philosophical transformations as the nature of science itself changes.

Comment from 2021: When Gould's tome The Structure of Evolutionary Theory was published, I was too intimidated by its massive size to read it. I have begun reading it. It is also an investigation into the evolution of the theory of natural selection itself. Oddly, Gould never cites this book, even though it came out seven years before his imposing block of paper. Gould deals with punctuated equilibrium (of course), but also the theoretical implications of regulatory genes (such as Carroll discussed), and David Sloan Wilson's Multilevel Selection Theory. While Gould's book takes on topics that are still lively, and Depew tackled a trend in non-linear dynamics that has not had as much impact, Depew's study looks at biology from a wider focus. Gould is more fixated on trends within biology, and not on broader trends in science, such as the rise of statistical modeling.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in natural history. W. W. Norton, 1991.

Originally reviewed in 2006

This is one of Gould's many collections of essays originally written for the magazine Natural History. I find the essays in Bully particularly good for helping the general reader see why many creationist ideas just don't work as good science.

For example, one essay reviews the Book of Genesis as a loose metaphor. Some people believe that while a literal reading of Genesis is false, Genesis might be true in its overall outline. Gould shows that even in outline, Genesis is contradicted by the geological record. Another essay recounts the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, and how they were created by an enormous flood. Gould then shows that the Young Earth Creationist belief in Noah's Flood as a worldwide deluge is nevertheless contradicted strongly by many lines of evidence.

The volume starts out with two essays that show how humans love neat creation stories, even when they are false. In mid-volume, Gould shows that William Jennings Bryan was not a complete crackpot, nor was Kropotkin. Gould loves to show that the official, socially accepted history is not as accurate as one might think.

Many other topics are covered in the roughly 20 essays, all written in Gould's superb prose style. It is a good read for anyone who is interested in natural history but who is unenthusiastic about laboring through a scientific tome. It is especially useful for anyone looking for debating points to criticize creationism.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes. Norton, 1983.

Originally reviewed in 2007: The Third in an Excellent Series of Essay Collections

This is the third volume of Gould's collections of essays originally written for the magazine Natural History. Gould liked to bring to a popular audience current findings in evolution and the history of science. He had a liberal/left political sensibility that came through in his essays, and made them more palatable for a large section of the thinking public, many of whom are wary of evolution as a potential tool for right-wing Social Darwinism.

This particular volume was the first of the series that I read, and I am very fond of it. I reread parts in order to write this review, and it has not lost its charm. Gould has several topics that he returns to in his thinking, and this volume is well represented with them. They include: curiosities of natural history that help to illustrate evolutionary theory, the history of evolutionary thought, and the history of social abuses that have used biology and evolution as a justification for racism and other forms of discrimination.

The title essay discusses the genetics of animal development from an embryo to a mature adult. That essay and the one following report on the early findings of a discipline that has only flowered after Gould's death: evolutionary developmental biology, or Evo Devo. Even the early results suggested that major morphological changes can be controlled during development by very few genes. Now that the mechanism has been more fully studied, we know that major morphology can be controlled by very short DNA tags that switch genes on and off during sequences of development. For a good, current discussion of Evo Devo, see Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

In the history of science, there are essays on Steno, Hutton, Cuvier (he was better than his reputation suggests), Agassiz, Vavilov (a victim of Lysenko), and Teilhard de Chardin. (Gould offers further evidence for his theory that Chardin may have committed the Pithdown fraud. From my little reading, I think the defenders of Chardin actually have the stronger case.)

Gould has several essays about the creationist Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. His analysis of the trial is a bit flawed, and I recommend Edward Larson's Summer of the Gods for a more accurate account. Gould brings Scopes to the present because the Arkansas trial of anti-evolution laws had just been completed.

Gould's social concerns focus in this volume on the use of fraudulent statistics in the 1840s to discriminate against blacks and the efforts of early 20th century statisticians to denigrate jewish immigrants. He applies scientific methods to the study of the shrinking of Hershey's candy bars. He celebrates the early findings of Walter Alvarez on the impact theory of the K-T extinction. There is an essay that foreshadows his book Full House.

As always, he writes with skill and humor. All in all, a good collection.

Hawks, John D. The Rise of Humans: Great Scientific Debates. (CD-Audio). Great Courses, 1612. Teaching Company, 2011.

Originally reviewed in 2013: Human Origins with a focus on the scientists's human drama.

The style of delivery is good, without too many digressions. Hawks is not as fun to listen to as Sapolsky (on neurology) or Brier (on Egypt), but he is better than Barbara King (on anthropology). That having been said, this course is not a systematically arranged presentation of the current understanding of the details of human origins. Instead, Hawks has organized the course around the thesis of the nature of scientific debate. Each lecture studies an example of a disagreement within the paleoanthropological community.

In this way, Hawks explores the nature of science itself using human origins as the science in question. For those already solid on the fossil record who are interested in a deeper look at the field, or for those with an interest in the history and philosophy of science, this is a good series of lectures. It is also good for learning some recent developments in the field (as of 2011). For those who just want a presentation of the mainline accepted theory, this might not be the way to go. That having been said, Hawks often structures the lectures in order of the appearance of the fossils in question, so it is roughly in geological order, and he hits the high points of controversy within the field.

For a more straightforward presentation, the second edition of Ian Tattersall's Fossil Trail would probably be good (thorough, but not a light read). However, the Tattersall book (from 2008) is already older than the public announcement of Ardipithicus and the recent discovery (2010) of interbreeding between Sapiens and Neanderthals. This lecture series by Hawks is more recent and has more current information.

I got this lecture series because of the breaking news about Sapien / Neanderthal interbreeding. It does discuss that situation, but it gave me nothing more than the news accounts in science magazines I had already seen. Instead, other parts of the lecture series were new to me. I obtained the lectures for one reason, but then enjoyed them for other reasons. For example, I learned several new lines of evidence (in lecture 15) on whether Neanderthals could speak. I had never before heard of the Movius line (lecture 10). I had not heard about the evidence against a simple version of the demic diffusion theory (lecture 23). Also, I did not know that there is a variant of malaria to which all humans are immune, and chimps can catch (lecture 24).

There is one detail where I would take issue with Hawks. Hawks says that, in the debate between the "multiregional" hypothesis and the "out of Africa" hypothesis, the multiregional hypothesis won. The old multiregional hypothesis said that the different human races evolved separately over the last one million years and only mixed a small fraction of their genes recently, and that old theory has turned out to be false. That was the multiregional hypothesis that Stephen Jay Gould railed against. What is new is that a strict version of the "out of Africa" hypothesis, which said that there was absolutely no mixing between modern Sapiens and other local hominid populations, now turns out to be false also.

What currently seems to be the case is that over 90% of the current human genome is recently out of one region in Africa, but that the modern Sapiens did a little bit of mixing with local populations of Neanderthals and Denisovans (and possibly some other subspecies). It is misleading to say that the multiregional hypothesis won, because for 90% of the genome the "out of Africa" won. A little bit of multiregionalism, a dash of Neanderthal and other groups if you will, does seem to be true. The strict version of out of Africa lost, but a looser version of "out of Africa" actually did win. That is very different from saying that the old multiregionalism might be true.

The reason that Gould and many others have been so uptight about multiregional versus Africa is because the old multiregional could be used to support racism. If we are all recently out of Africa, then we are all close cousins. The current "dash of multiregional" theory does not support racism: we are still, for over 90% of our DNA, all very close cousins. This fight over potential racism is the explosive issue lurking in this scientific debate. Hawks could have been clearer on this point: the current theory is not your grandfather's racist multiregionalism.

Johnson, Phillip E. Darwin on Trial. Regnery Gateway, 1991.

Originally reviewed in 2006: A carefully crafted lawyer's brief

This work is considered one of the most influential creationist texts following the creationist defeat in the Supreme Court in 1986. Johson argues that creationism is not given a chance by establishment scientists, because the current view of science rejects supernatural explanations a priori.

One aspect of Johnson's work is its lack of a positive theory. He simply claims that biological form may have been created. By being vague and arguing from a general philosophical position, he is able to appeal to creationists from all camps: young-Earth, old-Earth, etc. Also, his theory cannot be disproved, since he doesn't have one.

One critic has pointed out that Johnson was studying deconstruction and post-modern philosophy before writing this work. That critic claimed that an early draft of this book was originally entitled "Deconstructing Darwinism." The book clearly borrows from that school of thought. While some science studies critics might call for a "Feminist Science" or a "Non-Western Science," the new batch of creationists have taken a page from that book and are calling for a "Christian Science" (not to be confused with the Christian Scientists, which is a religious denomination).

Because of this line of attack, he ends up criticizing not only evolution by natural selection but the rest of science as well. He purposefully blurs the difference between metaphysical naturalism, which would typically contradict traditional Christian faith, and methodological naturalism, which is simply the way that the natural sciences operate: they limit their search for explanations of phenomena to natural causes.

An interesting observation: the field of biogeography was where the evidence for evolution by natural selection was most apparent to 19th century scientists. Both Darwin and Wallace were biogeographers when they thought of natural selection. In this text, Johnson only mentions biogeography in passing in a footnote to dismiss it. Clearly, Dr. Johnson is not interested in evidence, any more than Lacan or Derrida were interested in it.

The best criticism of Johnson's writing that I have found is in Pennock's "Tower of Babel." Pennock carefully explains the difference between metaphysical and methodological naturalism, and shows why methodological naturalism is indispensable to scientific investigation. Pennock shows that the sort of supernatural evidence that Johnson asks to be admitted in science would be equally unworkable and unwelcome in Johnson's own discipline of jurisprudence. If we can admit miraculous biology, then we are only a short distance away from conducting witch trials.

One of Johnson's biggest fears about evolution by natural selection is that it will rob society of the concept of free will. He neglects the fact that any research that tends to show that human behavior is influenced by external stimuli, whether or not that research relates to evolutionary theory or not, will tend to qualify one's attitude toward free will and individual responsibility. Steven Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, has a great discussion about individual responsibility at the end of the first chapter. Daniel Dennett in his philosophical work calls this phenomenon, the "Specter of Creeping Exculpation." Many philosophers for centuries have defended the concept of personal responsibility despite external natural causes for behavior. For example, James Waller, in his book Becoming Evil, a book about the psychological circumstances that lead to genocide, defends the concept of responsibility with regard to mass killings.

Bottom line: Evolution does not entail a rejection of personal responsibility, and other, non-evolutionary explanations of behavior suggest constraints on personal responsibility just as much as those of natural selection. Indeed, religion provides its own excuses for weaseling out of responsibility. To quote Flip Wilson, "The devil made me do it." Others might say, "I have accepted God, and now I am born again as a changed person." Even the moral fate that Johnson fears from atheistic science is a non-starter. Both his fears and his philosophy are misguided, though he is a skilled lawyer at arguing his case.

Kirschner, Marc and John Gerhart. The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma. Yale UP, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Facilitated Variation completes Theory of Evolution

This book, along with Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, was one of the best popular explanations of the new synthesis coming out of the evo devo movement. (According to other, much more knowledgeable reviewers than myself.)

Evolutionary Developmental Biology (evo devo) was a discipline that started in the 1980s, got going in the 1990s, and became a major intellectual force in the early Noughties (2000s). Classical embryology flowered in the 1920s, but it had been sidelined by other biological developments, such as the discovery of DNA. It was only in the late 20th century that the molecular basis of embryology and development could be well enough understood that cellular biology and developmental biology could be integrated. The result of this synthesis then could be integrated with evolutionary theory into a powerful combination, evo devo.

The book's thesis: That the plausibility of life depends on the plausibility of viable novelty. The authors put forward a Theory of Facilitated Variation to show that an organism's phenotype varies in ways biased towards viability and novelty. Darwin's Theory of Evolution has three parts: natural selection, heredity, and phenotypic variation. The first two have been thoroughly studied, but the last has only been studied well with recent evo devo. This addition is needed when debating with Intelligent Design advocates, because they focus on the question of phenotypic novelty.

In the first major part, the authors argue that the cellular basis for embryological development and physiological adjustment is the same as the basis for the step-wise evolution of a species of organisms. A key phrase is "somatic adaptability" (let's call it SA). Somatic change means a change that the organism makes to its anatomy, physiology, or behavior that will benefit itself immediately, but which will not be inherited by its progeny. SA includes a larval form turning into an adult form, but also things like calluses, red blood cells adjusting to high altitudes, and muscles being increased due to exercise (or the long-term potentiation of neurons changing when the subject learns something, like the contents of this book).

When one examines the molecular basis for the body adjusting itself to its environment, one finds that the mechanisms used by SA are the same as the ones that are modified by evolution when affixing changes into the heritable genome. The authors use the example of how a creature determines its gender. For some organisms, sex is determined by the environment. For others, it is genetically fixed. Both the environmental triggers and the genetic triggers use the same underlying "conserved core process" to engage the sexual gears.

The book only briefly (page 261) draws the parallel which I find most interesting: the parallel between biology and computer science. For example, life handles its information in a way that is very similar to how the Unix operating system of computers handles its code. According to Kirschner and Gerhart, life maintains highly conserved core processes which are then used and reused in a myriad of combinations to manage organisms from bacteria to humans. Evolution and SA take place by changing the sequence and combinations of reuse, not by changing the core processes.

When one looks at the history of computer operating systems, one sees the same source code paradigm in the Unix operating system. The failed predecessor of Unix was Multics, which was never completed because it was too unwieldy. Unix succeeded by breaking down all functions, whether they were in the kernel of the system or called by low-privileged users, into conserved core processes. All Unix operations reuse these core processes in complex combinations. This architecture allows the kernel to be small and evolution of new functions to be quick and reliable. Life and Unix use the same basic organizing principle.

The chapter on exploratory behavior describes how the information which is necessary for some of the complex structures in the organism bubbles up in grassroots fashion from all of the cells in the body, rather than being dictated from the top down by the genome. The network of blood vessels, the network of nerves connecting tissues to the brain, and the cytoskeleton within each cell are not planned out ahead of time and encoded into the genome. Rather, simple signals, both environmental and genetic, guide a process that evolves these structures randomly.

This phenomenon of exploratory behavior was also described in the early chapters of the book The Tinkerer's Apprentice. What it means for evolution is that new structures do not need to be encoded with the blueprint for their own blood vessels and nerve fibers. This makes novelty much more plausible.

The chapter called "Invisible Anatomy" discusses the creation of invisible compartments within metazoa as they develop from eggs. These compartments are delineated by which HOX genes are expressed. Once the compartments are laid out grid-like in the embryo, each cell knows the compartment it belongs to. This facilitates morphological change by allowing signals to be interpreted differently, depending on the developing cell's compartment.

Because the processes that lay out the grid in the middle stage of development are highly constrained, they allow both earlier development and later development to be deconstrained with regard to novelty. A computer science analogy to this is the concept of object-oriented programming, where changes in one part of the program are compartmentalized.

One of the coolest facts about this developmental grid is that all organisms within a phylum have the same grid pattern. So phyla really do exist, they are not just convenient but arbitrary classification schemes thought up by taxonomists.

The best quote in the book does not name Stephen Jay Gould, but it directly disputes one of his controlling metaphors. "Rather than staggering like a drunken sailor, evolution marches along a myriad of paved paths, changing direction without instruction, but taking large, forceful steps and avoiding many lethal obstacles" (247). Gould had claimed that evolutionary change was like the random walk of a drunken sailor. The authors show that because variation is facilitated by a bias towards viability and novelty, phenotypic variation is not random.

The authors comment towards the end of the book that proponents of Intelligent Design like to attack the Theory of Evolution on the point of the generation of novelty. Compartment grids prove Philip Johnson's attack on Haeckel wrong, for example. Reuse of conserved core processes shows Behe is wrong. Facilitated variation shows novelty is not implausible.

The prose is clear and readable, though the ideas are very meaty. Well done.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: the Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. Harvard UP, 1998.

Edward Larson has written an excellent history of the Scopes trial. He debunks many misconceptions about the proceedings and outcome of the trial. For example, it turns out that the overall result of the trial was a victory for creationists, not for science. Creationist legislation succeeded in many areas of the South and southern Midwest. Textbooks avoided discussion of evolution after the trial. However, the urban areas of the East and upper Midwest strengthened their support for evolution, associating creationism with primitive ideas of rural America.

Other interesting facts from the trial: the ACLU was not excited about getting Darrow as their lawyer. He imposed himself on them, and they couldn't turn him down without bad publicity. To their chagrin, Darrow polarized the trial and made it more about him and his ideas on religion than about academic freedom and the strong evidence for biological evolution. With friends like that ...

Another interesting point, Bryan did not leave the trial in disgrace. He triumphed. It was only with revisionist histories written later did the idea become common that the creationists had failed in the trial. Perhaps those who watch the movie "Inherit the Wind" think that scientific knowledge triumphed, but the actual result was quite different.

The merits of the theory of biological evolution were not heard in court until much later in 1981 in Arkansas, and they were only thoroughly examined in a court of law as recently as 2005 in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Pääbo, Svante. Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. Basic Books, 2014.

Originally reviewed in 2014: Page turner about Quality of Data

I really like this book. It tells the story of the decoding of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. The focus of the book, however, is on the challenges of keeping your samples uncontaminated and your data clean. I am a bit of a science nerd, but I felt the book was well-paced and kept the reader's attention, despite the complex details of the science. Pääbo adds just enough anecdotes to keep the part of my brain satisfied that needs some gossip. But the personal details do not crowd out the science story. Because other groups were racing to the same goal, there is a natural narrative arc to the text—much as there is for competitive sporting events—and the excitement holds up until the end of the book.

I am a firm believer that a key aspect of science is the question: how confident we can be in the knowledge claims that we make? Here, Pääbo describes the great lengths to which his team has gone to minimize contamination and to test his data for errors. That is an important part of the story of these genomes, because the public should be highly skeptical about claims such as these. To convince the general public of the reality of the Neanderthal genome, it is critical to address that skepticism. Pääbo addresses the public effectively, just as he effectively convinced his scientific peers of his thoroughness.

That having been said, one of Pääbo's personal stories is about how he and his wife got together. She had been married to a colleague when they started to get romantically involved. Pääbo claims that it was all amicable. I would be interested to hear the ex-husband's version of the story. Also, Pääbo admits he had to cajole the scientific establishments of Croatia and Russia to allow him access to the needed fossils. Then he goes on to praise some Croatian and Russian colleagues highly. Do they deserve that praise, or is this necessary flattery? It is fun to wonder.

Pennock, Robert. Tower of Babel. MIT, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Excellent Critique of Modern Intelligent Design Creationism

Robert Pennock's "Tower of Babel" is a book that explores the philosophy of science and the philosophical foundations of creationism. Pennock's focus is the difference between metaphysical naturalism, which posits that the observable world is basically all that there is, and methodological naturalism, which is the operating principle that observable natural phenomena have natural causes. The first is a philosophical position that cannot be proven by scientific investigation. The second is a necessary precondition for scientific investigation.

Phillip Johnson, Alvin Plantinga and others, who are leading a new generation of creationists, have argued that even methodological naturalism is an atheistic philosophy that a priori excludes from science a possible range of explanations where observable natural phenomena are caused by supernatural entities, such as God or the devil. Pennock's rebuttal is at first difficult to follow and not persuasive, but as the explanation develops and cases are explored, the point is driven home.

Pennock's point is that he defines the supernatural as fundamentally unknowable. If an agent is not able to be predicted, then any phenomenon whatsoever can be explained by the introduction of arbitrary supernatural agents. If we posit a supernatural agent, but then claim that we understand and can describe that agent's motives for action, then the agent ceases to be, by Pennock's definition, supernatural. He describes this situation as "naturalizing the supernatural." He says, well, if you naturalize God, then you could introduce God as a causal agent into a scientific hypothesis, but then you are not introducing a supernatural explanation, because you have naturalized the agent in question.

Personally, I do not care for Pennock's vocabulary. I am sure that it comes out of a long philosophical tradition, and I am sure that he has excellent reasons for using it, but it can easily confuse. I would prefer to say, "You can introduce what many people consider a supernatural agent as long as you then hypothesize why the agent acted and what the agent did." That rephrasing would weaken the force of the mantra of modern creationist philosophy.

The examples help a great deal in making the point. Pennock compares the realms of science and the law. If courts allowed supernatural explanations, then you could claim that you did not intend to commit the crime, you were under a witch's spell. Or the devil made you do it. Or that you had actually been magically transported to hell while the crime was being committed, and a devil took your shape and committed the crime instead of you. If anyone asks for evidence, you can say that it was supernatural and not observable. Spiritualists and mediums could become expert witnesses.

The practice of naturalizing the supernatural can be seen in the earlier history of biology and natural history. Because pre-Darwinian biologists hypothesized that God would perfectly create each species to fill a niche in the ecosystem, the hypothesis was testable. Darwin and other biogeographers tested it and established that it was false. Earlier still, natural historians hypothesized that God would not permit a species to become extinct. That naturalized a supernatural entity, and it too was established to be false.

Pennock shows how Phillip Johnson dances around the issue of stating exactly what the supernatural agents he supports did and why. The reason is because every time people have committed, the hypotheses were testable and rejected. Instead, Johnson plays coy, claiming that traditional science is unfair. But clearly, Johnson sees his God as a knowable entity. Pennock points out that Johnson is not a Supernaturalist, but a super Naturalist, trying to naturalize the supernatural, thereby becoming what he condemns. Johnson's dilemma lies at the heart of the philosophical troubles for creationism and Intelligent Design.

Additionally, the book gives excellent rebuttals to some of the arguments and analogies used by Michael Behe, one of the few ID proponents to have a Ph.D. in a biological field.

Quammen, David. The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: an Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of his Theory of Evolution. Norton, 2006.

In 2023: Avaiable as an Audio eBook through Hoopla

Originally reviewed in 2013: Good Biography of Darwin, Good for a High School Reading Level

The prose of this book is smooth and lets you read effortlessly. This well-told tale is light enough that it could be enjoyed by a high schooler or by a vacationer on the beach. The Darwin story is one that already has a good plot, and Quammen tells it well. Since the 1980s, there has been a great deal of scholarship on Darwin as more accurate and complete editions of his letters and journals have been published. Janet Brown in particular has written a multi-volume comprehensive biography of Darwin. Quammen has benefited from this recent scholarship, and he has boiled it down to a page-turner.

Here is a sample sentence to show Quammen's style: "Essentialism and natural theology were as thick in the air of Darwin's world as coal smoke and the scent of horse manure" (p. 33).

One aspect of recent scholarship that Quammen has glossed over is the evidence that Darwin agreed with the creepier ideas of Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism and eugenics. Instead, the book ends with the passing of a lovable, eccentric old man who doted on his grandchildren and had, in the end, gotten it right. For a book that examines the darker side of Darwin before deciding that his positive qualities outweigh that darker side, read Levine's Darwin Loves You.

Quammen largely skips the early half of Darwin's life and begins when the Beagle returns to Britain. This makes sense, as the later Darwin is why we know about Darwin at all: it is where the intellectual struggle over evolution begins. Quammen does spend time on the theories of evolution and natural selection themselves, and he presents the evidence for them well enough to give the reader a sense of how strong that evidence is. In other words, this book would be good for someone flirting with creationism. The next to last chapter chronicles how the theory of natural selection failed to convince many scientists until the development of the Modern Synthesis in the mid-20th century.

Reluctant is careful with its sources and provides good notes, bibliographies, and an index, so it can be the launching off point for the budding scholar. In preparing for this book, Quammen read most of Darwin's other writings, and he comes to the conclusion that the only two books that hold up well today are the journal of the Beagle (the 1845 edition, called Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology ... arranges the Galapagos evidence with an eye toward the theory of evolution) and Origin of Species. Quammen even reviews the editorial differences among the many editions of Origin of Species, and he advises readers to look for a facsimile of the first edition.

Rachels, James. Created from Animals: the Moral Implications of Darwinism. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Originally written in 2006: Clear and well-written meditation on evolution and morals

Creationist critics of evolution often argue that people must reject the science of evolution because it has leads to immorality and atheism. William Jennings Bryan, for example, equated evolution with militaristic and socially ruthless political platforms. Many defenders of biological evolution argue that evolution by natural selection does not entail any specific ethical statements. They point out that you cannot logically go from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement: the naturalistic fallacy.

Rachels does a good job of showing that, while "how the world works" does not entail moral statements, it is nevertheless true that many ethical philosophers have used statements about nature to support their claims. Careful philosophers avoid making ethical conclusions solely from natural premises, but they often use claims about nature to show that their ethical postulates are reasonable. If science pulls the natural claims out from under the moralists, the moral chain of reasoning seems less plausible and more arbitrary. One can outline a moral system that stands against natural inclinations, but it makes for a tougher sell to potential adherents.

In this way, Rachels shows that opponents of evolution do have legitimate fears for their moral systems. They have often relied on natural claims to provide emotional support for their ethics, natural claims that have sometimes been rejected by later developments in science. Moralists usually want to make their ideas feel uniquely correct to inspire followers. Losing supporting natural claims does not help. Even today, leftists of the Critical Theory school can maintain that humans are not really animals, the principle of antiphysis. In that way, they are not as distant from defenders of traditional supernatural theology as they would like to think.

This book is accessible to the general reader and brings out points too often neglected by both sides in the creationist assault on science.

Richards, Janet Radcliffe. Human Nature after Darwin: a Philosophical Introduction. Routledge, 2000.

Originally written in 2011: Introduction to philosophy focused on logical implications of Darwinism

Having read many books on both Darwinian evolution and philosophy, I was intrigued by this book, which was advertised as an exploration of the philosophical implications of evolution in general, including evolutionary psychology.

The author did not set out to write a book about evolution; instead, she set out to write a basic college textbook in logic. That book on logic was to use examples of logical errors from three different disciplines. However, she discovered that debates about evolution were riddled with logical errors and that she could devote the entire book to flaws in reasoning in that field alone.

The legacy of that original plan is still evident in the book, and it can be used as a Logic 101 textbook. For example, each section of each chapter ends with exercises for the student, and answers to the exercises are found in the back of the book. (Those exercises even use the other two disciplines from Richards' original book.)

The author states up front that she will go excruciatingly slowly in making her points, in order to tease out the logical structure. The point is to apply basic philosophical reasoning and to show how it can be employed to the arguments for any topic whatsoever. Be warned that the book is not a page-turner. Excruciating is not an inappropriate adjective for the text.

Nevertheless, evolutionary arguments deserve to be analyzed with all deliberate speed. Many thinkers in our culture write at length on the religious, social, and philosophical implications of the different versions of Darwinian evolution, and Richards systematically shows that many of them, on both sides of various controversies, commit logical fallacies that make their claims invalid. As she points out in her conclusion: "If your reasoning ... goes wrong because of muddle, or equivocation, or mistakes in logic, then your practical conclusions will be just as unreliable as if you get the facts wrong" (269).

A quick review of the subtopics covered:

1. How solid is the epistemology and philosophical basis of Darwinism as a scientific discipline? (Answer: Solid.)
2. What are the different varieties of Darwinism? (See below)
3. How does one construct logical conditionals to investigate flaws in reasoning?
4. Do different versions of Darwinism have different implications for free will and determinism? (Answer: No.)
5. Do some versions of Darwinism imply that people are no longer responsible for their actions? (Answer: No.)
6. Do different versions of Darwinism have different implications for whether or not true altruism can exist? (Answer: No.)
7. Does a denial of the existence of an omnipotent God mean that objective moral truth is not possible? (Answer: Depends.)
8. Are we justified, as Philip Kitcher claimed, in demanding a higher burden of proof for evolutionary psychology than for other scientific disciplines? (Answer: No.)
9. What are the really different implications for living one's life among the various options discussed in the book? (Answer: Not many.)

Richards lays out a spectrum of belief from a) strict theism that denies all Darwinism, b) dualism that accepts biological evolution but rejects strict metaphysical materialism, c) Darwinism that accepts metaphysical materialism but rejects the claims of evolutionary psychology, and d) a Darwinism that accepts evolutionary psychology. As Richards points out, because she lays out her arguments clearly, one can spot the point in the chain of logical inference where one disagrees with her. Even when one does disagree, it is easy to articulate the basis for that disagreement.

For what it sets out to do, this book succeeds. It is a pity that it is not more widely read, especially by those who argue about the broader implications of Darwinism. It is also a pity that it is not written in a more approachable style, which might get more people to read it.

Berreby, David. Us and Them: Understanding your Tribal Mind. Little, Brown and Co., 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2007: Excellent Popular Explanation of Social Psychology from an Evolutionary Framework

Us and Them by David Berreby explores the human faculty for seeing other people as members of groups with group characteristics, or as Berreby calls them, Human Kinds. The book examines classic results of social psychology, such as Sharif's Robber's Cave experiment and Tajfel's arbitrary groups. He argues that there is a specific human faculty for automatically placing people into groups and attaching group qualities to them. He presents the current evidence for that faculty being an unconscious module in the mind.

The book is well written and has many vivid examples of how people stereotype and why those stereotypes are not reliable guides for rational human behavior. Although he occasionally dives into brain architecture and evolutionary theory, it is not too overwhelming for the intelligent lay reader (that all-important Human Kind). The topic is very important, considering that issues of race, gender, religious conflict, and injustice based on economic class dominate our political scene. This book helps the reader get a better scientific footing on the psychological basis of those issues.

By exploring how our human minds—and by extension our brains—process group identity, the author is in an area that has been popular lately due in part to Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. This research area is called the modular theory of the mind, pioneered by people such as Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky. However, Berreby is wary of Pinker's complete programme. He explicitly criticizes Pinker. Never in this book does Berreby refer to a brain "module." Instead, he refers to the mind's code for processing human kind thinking, called kind-sight. To this reader, it amounts to the same thing. A module is a module. Berreby does make the point at length that there is no single chunk of brain that does all human-kind code processing. (But, then, I don't think Pinker ever claimed that, either.)

Berreby does show that the human-kind code is automatic, unconscious, and hardwired into the developing brain. This to me qualifies his theory as in the tradition of the modular theory of the mind.

Berreby also holds evolutionary theory at arm's length. He is wary of strict reductionism from social structures to selfish genes. He seems uncomfortable with Williams and Dawkins and their insistence that the selfish gene is the final arbiter of evolution. This wariness leads to an excellent exploration of the nature of science and "levels of analysis." He describes the "selfish gene" camp and the "plurality of mechanisms" camp as two competing social groups that use stereotypes and intergroup hostility as part of their own human kind thinking. Clearly, he doesn't want to be a blind follower of either camp.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that he does consider the faculty for kind-sight to be an evolved and distinct mental structure. To that extent, he is, whether he admits it or not, an Evolutionary Psychologist (or Evo Psycho as he mentions in the book).

Berreby rejects what he sees as Pinker's pessimism about the human-kind faculty. He ends the book with a hopeful gesture that we can take control of our own destiny by rationally controlling our irrational kind-sight faculty. But he admits that the faculty that propels us to reach the ideals of our human kind is inseparable from the faculty that can lead to genocide. I am not convinced that Berreby's conclusion should lead to optimism. Pinker's outlook was really not that pessimistic. All in all, they amount to nearly the same thing.

Berreby is critical of thinkers who use this capacity within human nature for group violence to claim that human nature is fundamentally capable of evil. He expressly does not want the evil potential for kind-sight to be used to bolster a theologically Christian worldview. But in the end, his conclusions do not eliminate that line of argument. So long as humans have an irrational kind-sight, we will be fully capable of prejudice and evil. The hope that everyone will rationally control their prejudices for the long-term is contradicted by human history. He leaves us with an unattainable ideal.

Buss, David M. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. 2nd Edition. New York : Basic Books, 2003.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Good book, with some weaknesses.

This book covers the topic of sexual behavior and strategies from an evolutionary psychology (EP) point of view. It is considered by some one of the major texts on that topic within the EP research programme.

One of the problems with the text is that Buss will sometimes get ahead of solid evidence and speculate about what he thinks ought to be the case. He sometimes presents context A as causing behavior B when the evidence only shows that A tends to occur together with (correlates with) B. For example, on page 93, he cites studies that show that women whose parents are divorced are more promiscuous, suggesting causation. But Judith Harris, in her book "No Two Alike" (2006), showed why that correlation is unlikely to be causative.

That having been said, he usually brings several pieces of evidence to each of his claims, so his arguments do appear strong. The writing is clear, and he does attempt to take some care about his conclusions. For example, I thought he did a good job discussing the problem with mass media promoting unrealistic images of beauty. He usually tries to show that his conclusion is based not only on a positive correlation from surveys, etc., but also by considering contrary cases—showing that the exception proves the rule. His reasoning is not as sharp as Steven Pinker's, but it is reasonably sharp. His discussions of rape seem to me sensitive and judicious.

In John Dupre's book, "Human Nature and the Limits of Science," Dupre spend a good deal of time critiquing the first edition of this book as a representative text of evolutionary psychology. The highlights of Dupre's critique were: Buss (and by extension, EP) relies too much on a.) opinion surveys and b.) speculations about the environment in which humans evolved. Buss also could not explain major features of human sexuality, such as homosexuality. Dupre proceeded to dismiss all of EP.

I agree with Dupre that Buss does rely heavily on opinion surveys. But Buss goes to some lengths to make them as neutral to the assumptions of the researchers as he can. He typically has one survey group create the categories that a second group then ranks. He also brings in survey data from cross-cultural studies, to show that these tendencies are universal to humans. He uses data from decades earlier, to show constancy through time. He drags in primitive tribes, such as the Ache and the Yamanomo, to bring in an anthropological perspective on human evolution. He uses objective data on age at marriage. He cites Daly and Wilson on crime statistics. But Buss does not typically show the sort of neurological evidence that Pinker does when Pinker discusses language or 3D vision.

As far as homosexuality, Buss devotes a good deal of space to showing that the major attempts at an evolutionary explanation for it have failed. He freely admits that it is an enigma from an evolutionary perspective. But having done that, he is able to pose and answer the question: does someone who is homosexual have the same typical sexual strategies as someone of his or her own sex who is not attracted to other people of their same sex, or does the person who is attracted to other people of the same sex have the typical sexual strategy of someone of the other sex? (Note here that I steer away from socially constructed gender and am limiting myself to biological sex.) It turns out for example that a gay man typically has the same sexual strategy as a straight man, and so forth. While the object of the desire is inexplicable, the strategies are typical for others of that same sex. Dupre's critique is not fair, at least relating to the second edition of the book.

I do find Buss focuses too much on the "love-em-and-leave-em" type scenarios of sexual behavior. While he acknowledges long-term relationships as the dominant mating strategy, he seems fixated on calculating the advantages of short-term behavior. It certainly happens, and it is certainly common, but one could also spend time examining passionate loyalty, unstoppable grief at loss, and dying of a broken heart. The book is good, and better than some critics admit, but it could stand a bit more passion.

Afterword in 2022: Above most other scholars in the field of evolutionary psychology, Buss has done more to keep EP within the standards of serious social science. He has published a textbook on Evolutionary Psychology, and it is in its sixth edition. When the journal Sex Roles planned a special issue to critique EP from a feminist perspective, Buss managed to turn the issue into a more equal dialogue between the two scholarly communities. He sees EP as pursuing scientific truth rather than a partisan agenda, so he welcomes dialogue with scholars who criticize the research programme.

Buss's prominence as one of EP's leading theorists and scholars makes this popularization even more important. This book is not just pushing a crank agenda that ignores legitimate criticism. It argues for serious social science.

De Waal, Frans B. M. Different: Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist. Norton, 2022.

Originally reviewed in 2023: Yes, Those Bloody Monkeys Again

After finishing the book, I am inclined to think that you should only listen to someone's opinion on the nature of human gender if that person is a primatologist.

De Waal threads a tricky path through a topic that is politically charged. De Waal strongly distances himself from those thinkers who would argue that men are, in some fundamental sense, superior to women. He uses as a negative example the influential study published in the 1930s by the primatologist Solly Zuckerman which was called Monkey Hill. The Monkey Hill study seemed to imply that humans, if left to their primate nature, would create a society where life is brutish, nasty, and short. De Waal shows that primates do not generally behave that way, and that the observations from primatology do not limit human nature to the Monkey Hill stereotype. He is inclined toward a more liberal interpretation of the data from primatology. This liberal leaning notwithstanding, de Waal insists that there really are biologically-derived sex differences among us. The title of his book is, after all, Different.

Some thinkers who are opposed to the ideological position of male superiority go so far as to deny that biology has anything to do with human gender. De Waal argues that this position is also extreme and flat out wrong. An example that de Waal uses is Judith Butler's claim from the 1980s that gender is not a (biological) fact but a social construct. De Waal gives many examples from both humans and other primates to show that, in fact, biology matters a great deal. Most of the book probes the relationship of biological nature and cultural nurture. De Waal argues that primates mature so slowly so that their young can learn a complex culture. Our biological nature is to be culturally nurtured. One thesis he puts forward is that, among primates, the young are attracted to imitate adults of their own sex, and they take on gender roles through self-socialization, not through explicit instruction.

De Waal contrasts humans with those primates to which humans are most closely related: the chimpanzees and the bonobos. Chimps have a patriarchal and sometimes violent society, while bonobos have a more peaceful, matriarchal society. Even within the chimp's more male-dominated social groups, females exert political power and show leadership.

For example, within the group of chimpanzees at the Burgers' Zoo, a chimp called Mama was the alpha female for many years. Mama was looked to by the others in the group as the member who had the interests of the group as a whole most at heart, a group function which de Waal calls the "control role." Warring males within that group would seek Mama out to effect reconciliation between them.

De Waal agrees (at least in part) with the fundamental conceptual division that is the basis of modern gender studies; namely, that one can differentiate biological sex from socially-defined gender roles. "Gender refers to the learned overlays that turn a biological female into a woman and a biological male into a man" (12). He acknowledges the diversity of sex and gender, such as those persons who are intersex or transsexual. "Nevertheless, for the majority of people, gender and sex are congruent. Despite their different meanings, these two terms remain joined at the hip" (13). In this way, he diverges from gender theorists who believe that gender is completely divorced from sex. Because gender in most cases is intimately linked to the biological fact of sex, de Waal argues that gender is not entirely socially constructed. Margaret Mead is often seen as the originator of the 'gender is cultural' concept, so de Waal quotes from Mead's writings to show her support for his position.

One of de Waal's novel arguments in this debate comes from the study of transsexuals: "The existence of transgender people challenges the notion of gender as an arbitrary social construct. Gender roles may be cultural products, but gender identity itself seems to arise from within" (56). He argues that gender identity is strongly formed early in a person's development and that the existence of transsexuals refutes Butler's social construct theory.

De Waal is sympathetic to the concern about gender inequality, but he rejects the idea that the way to achieve gender equality is to claim that gender is a choice. The focus of efforts toward equality needs to be on the second word in the phrase: inequality. "Whether the push for gender equality will succeed doesn't hinge on the outcome of the eternal debate about real or imagined sex differences. Equality doesn't require similarity" (14).

De Waal's perspective is important for evolutionary psychologists and therefore evolutionary literary critics because gender and sexuality are important components of those fields, and he critiques their treatment with deep observational experience. He directly criticizes naive versions of the theory of sexual strategies, which he refers to as the Bateman's Principle. Further, he strongly criticizes the Thornhill and Palmer theory that rape is adaptive. While he insists that the in-born tendencies which are shaped by evolution are important, he also emphasizes that behavior is highly flexible and dependent on context, especially cultural context.

In the last chapter, (pages 310-311) de Waal lists human psychological patterns that do seem to be strongly governed by our evolutionary biology and those that do not seem to be. For those behaviors that are strongly biologically based, he argues that they are not stereotypical but archetypical. In this category, females are more nurturing of young, and males are more status-oriented and violent. Behaviors that other theorists have associated with sex, but which de Waal does not, include: leadership skills, tendencies to form status hierarchies, tendencies toward sexual promiscuity, and competitiveness.

De Waal argues that humans do have unique aspects of our evolutionary psychology that are not shared by even our closest primate cousins. First, he argues that pair-bonded male-female relationships are part of our biology. "I believe it is this pair-bond that sets us apart from the apes more than anything else" (275). Second, he points out that, while it is not rare among many species of primates for females to cooperate with one another, it is rare for males to do so. "Male teamwork is a hallmark of human society" (231).

De Waal discusses the fact that there are deep and subconscious differences in how all people treat women and men. The people who know this fact best are transsexuals who have experienced interpersonal behavior first as one gender and then as the other. He describes some of their observations but then emphasizes that this discussion is not an endorsement of the biased behavior they describe. "Instead, it highlights how deeply primate sexual dimorphism sticks in our subconscious" (252). One example de Waal offers is that women are taken less seriously because of their high-pitched voices.

A second, more disturbing example of this deep inequality is a trolley problem experiment in which the subject can imagine pushing a man or a woman onto the trolley tracks to save five other people. Ninety percent of both sexes would prefer to push the man rather than the woman (180). Women may suffer indignities such as not be taken seriously in a debate because of their voices, but men are the preferred sex for cannon fodder.

One of the book's theses is that a diversity of sexual orientations and sexual identities are natural. De Waal devotes one entire chapter to the bonobos, whose social groups feature a high degree of female-female sex, and he has a later chapter on same-sex sex throughout the natural world. He rejects the claim that this is unnatural. With regard to sexual identity, he cites research that suggests that, in some transsexuals, brain development appears to lead to brain structures similar to the other sex, thereby indicating a biological basis for a transsexual's early and strongly held perception that he or she has a gender other than the individual's sex.

Social Hierarchies

One digression that I feel is important is de Waal's discussion of status hierarchies. In the third chapter of the book, de Waal suddenly veers away from a discussion of sex differences to the topic of social hierarchies. He recounts his student days, when he was part of revolutionary student organizations that protested against authority and hierarchy. The student leaders claimed that they could overthrow the power structure and found an egalitarian society.

Meanwhile, de Waal was studying a colony of chimpanzees in the Burgers' Zoo. There, he observed dominance hierarchies. As he writes, "In the evenings, I'd listen to bohemian-looking ideologues holding forth on the evil of hierarchies, while during the days, I'd observe power plays in the chimpanzee colony. This alternation induced a serious dilemma due to the contradictory messages. ... In the end, I found behavior to be so much more convincing than words that I placed my trust in the chimps"(76).

As for the revolutionaries, "Despite all their talk of equality, my fellow revolutionaries exhibited a distinct hierarchy, with a few driven young men at the top." (77) De Waal concludes, "We collectively suffered an egalitarian delusion. We engaged in fiercely democratic rhetoric, yet our actual behavior told a different story"(78).

De Waal then recounts that he was later hired into the Psychology department at Emory University. He describes a fundamental problem faced by psychologists: they belong to the very group of organisms they are trying to study. "This explains why psychology textbooks read almost like ideological tracts. Between the lines, we gather that racism is deplorable, sexism is wrong, aggression is / to be eliminated, and hierarchies are archaic"(78-79).

He quickly adds, "For me, this was a shock, not because I necessarily believe the opposite, but because such opinions interfere with science. ... Every time I received a psychology textbook from a publisher, I made a point of checking the index for entries on power and dominance. Most of the time, these terms were not even listed, as if they didn't apply to the social behavior of Homo sapiens." (79)

De Waal found Machiavelli's The Prince very informative of the behavior he was observing among the chimpanzees. He concludes, "The egalitarian delusion of the social sciences is all the more astounding since we all work at a university, which is one huge power structure." (79)

This studious act of ignoring the status hierarchy we are part of can be seen in texts on evolutionary psychology. The textbook by David Buss strongly features status and dominance hierarchies, while the textbook by Workman and Reader ignores them, as I wrote in a blog post in June of 2022.

I like de Waal's treatment of this topic, because he is keenly aware of the limits of social dominance. Still, it is easy to see why one might want to ignore status hierarchies, despite their centrality to human behavior. De Waal himself admits that conservative politicians mischaracterized the nature of the Alpha Male in his book Chimpanzee Politics. He became famous in the 1990s precisely because his discussion on dominance was distorted.

The final chapter of the book discusses philosophical dualism—the idea that the mind and body are fundamentally separate. De Waal rejects this philosophical position. He believes that it comes from male orientation toward the world. "This dualism is quintessentially masculine, concerned less with the human mind than with the male mind" (313). He finds it ironic that second-wave feminists, by arguing that gender is a social construct, have adopted a form of masculine dualism. Gina Rippon once protested against arguments from biology by saying "Not those bloody monkeys again!" De Waal's response is, yes, those bloody monkeys again.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mother Nature: a History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Pantheon Books, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2002:Evolutionary Psychology with feminist spin

This part of the review was posted to Amazon: I liked this book. Books such as Pinker's How the Mind Works and Ridley's Origins of Virtue cover some of the same ground, but Hrdy focuses on some issues that are more from a woman's point of view. It is a welcome addition to what is out there.

Everyone has a worldview that informs their interpretation of the evidence, and when it comes to the behavior of extinct human ancestors, the evidence is thin and the speculation is thick. Ridley seems to have a libertarian take on human evolution. Stephen Jay Gould seems to come at things from a more leftist angle. Sobel and Wilson in their book Unto Others give a spirited defense of altruism.

Hrdy is usually careful to avoid making a direct carry-over from the behavior of other primates to human behavior. She is pretty good at keeping the speculation fairly close to the observations. Hrdy's ideas are often just as speculative as the next theorist's, but her more feminist take is refreshing. For example, the idea that perhaps the childcare offered by grandmothers has had an impact on the human lifespan is reasonably well argued and is as plausible as other ideas. She is not as gifted a writer as Steven Pinker, but the book reads well and the perspective is worthwhile.

This part of the review is from 2012: One of the points that I did not make in the above review was that, while Hrdy is not unusual from the point of view of evolutionary biology and biological anthropology, she is unusual for a feminist. Many feminist theorists reject the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior because they feel that the gender roles that are predicted from the theory are potentially oppressive to women. Because the evidence of ancient hominid behavior is so thin, this application of evolution can be heavily colored by male bias. This book shows that you can stay within an evolutionary framework and posit pro-female scenarios. In this vein, Hrdy's books are similar to (but better than) Barbara King's 2002 Teaching Company lecture called "Biological Anthropology."

For a good discussion of how social constructivism and evolutionary theory can coexist, read David Sloan Wilson's essay called "Evolutionary Social Constructivism" in the book The Literary Animal (2005, edited by J. Gottschall, pp. 20-37).

This part of the review is from 2023: Since writing this, I have reviewed the issues of the journal Sex Roles that published articles on feminism and evolutionary psychology, which were published about the time I wrote in 2012. The initial special issue was conceived as a feminist critique of evolutionary psychology, but a dialogue between David Buss and the editors ensued, and the two perspectives were treated equally.

Hrdy's work continues to be respected. In Frans de Waal's book Different (2023), he cites Hrdy's work approvingly.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, 1994.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Major Work in Linguistics and Evolutionary Psychology

Pinker's Language Instinct is in its own league, not only in the perspective that it imparts, but in the quality of the writing. Pinker brings Chomsky's universal grammar to the masses, explaining how the mind processes linguistic structures. He then shows how the brain has to perform several distinct and complex operations in real time in order to use and understand language.

Pinker takes this complexity and shows what Chomsky had long concluded: that it has to come pre-constructed. It is an instinct, hardwired into human nature, and not some cultural fad. He then argues, contra Chomsky, that this hardwired complexity could only have come about via evolution by natural selection. Chomsky thinks of language in the abstract, as a snowflake, symmetrical and perfect. Pinker shows that how the brain implements that algorithm is full of kludges and compromises. The brain's language instinct is a tinkerer's construction, like a giraffe's neck, the product of natural selection.

The case that he makes for modular components of the mind coordinating to create an instinct is all the more powerful because it is supported by many lines of evidence. Other evolutionary psychologists have a more difficult time making the case for a module for this behavior, a module for that behavior, because the functions are not so clear cut. But with language, grammar is razor sharp, and becomes the exemplar for the existence of evolved brain modules.

While other theories of evolutionary psychology can be attacked because of a narrow range of evidence, for example John Dupre criticizing David Buss's theories of sexual behavior, Pinker presses his points in his later books such as How the Mind Works from the unassailable position of the language instinct.

Not only that, but there are a lot of jokes in this book, which make it a fun read, Chomsky's grammar notwithstanding.

Simler, Kevin and Robin Hanson. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford UP, 2018.

Originally reviewed in 2023 (never posted to WorldCat): Elephant, what elephant? I don't see any elephant.

Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson delve in depth into a topic that is much beloved by evolutionary psychologists, namely, the human capacity for self-deception. The evolutionary explanation of this set of phenomena is that our minds deceive themselves about our more selfish motives the better to deceive others.

According to Simler and Hanson, the evolutionary explanation for self-deception began with the game-theoretic work of Thomas Schelling in the 1960s. Robert Trivers then expanded on the ideas, and Kurzban has written about it. The idea is that our mind is not consciously aware of some of the motives that drive our behavior. Experimentation shows that our self-deceptions are strategic: we tend to deceive ourselves when it is to our benefit to do so.

Studies have shown that many athletes have an inflated sense of their abilities, and that those athletes who do have such an inflated self-image will perform better in competition against those who do not. Likewise, people who tell untruths are much more persuasive if they themselves believe the untruths than if they are consciously aware that they are lying. The best lie is one the liar himself believes.

Thomas Schelling had shown that, in game theory, there are situations where a self-deceiver will win a game against others who do not deceive themselves. Elephant reviews many scenarios where strategic self-deception offers the best explanation for the behavior observed.

To give one example, the pattern of how people give to charities shows hidden motives. People rarely give anonymously to charities. We often give to charities to show off our generosity to our local social group or to impress social gatekeepers. When ambitious politicians may do things like volunteer to wash dishes at a soup kitchen, they are signaling that they are prosocial, and that they will concern themselves for the welfare of others when they are given power. The selfless act is motivated at least in part by ambition, even if the conscious mind of the individual does not realize it.

Simler and Hanson discuss the concept put forward by Daniel Dennett and others that the conscious mind is not really in control of the behavior of the individual. They use the analogy of a president and a press secretary. The president has to know all the factors that go into a decision, while the press secretary's job is to offer plausible and socially acceptable motives for the decisions made. Because the press secretary doesn't actually make the decisions, there is a layer of plausible deniability in the arrangement. The point that Dennett and others have made is that the human conscious mind is a Press Secretary, not a President. Split-brain experiments have shown that the conscious mind is skilled at confabulating rationalizations without missing a beat. We are good at making up excuses.

Humans are unusual for mammals in our ability to be altruistic. We are cooperative enough that human societies can act as superorganisms. Each individual human has a drive to reproductive fitness, but human social groups have norms and rules to limit selfish behavior and foster loyalty to the group.

Simler and Hanson point out that, if these norms were perfectly enforced, our brains should shrink. It shouldn't take much mental capacity to follow the prosocial rules. Instead, the presence of norms causes our brains to expand, because our brains need to develop schemes for evading the social norms to further our individual interests while appearing to follow the norms against selfishness. Our selfish motives that we keep from our conscious awareness are referred to as The Elephant in the Brain.

Simler and Hanson argue that we have good motives as well as bad ones. They point out that our hidden selfish motives sometimes drive us to be more generous and cooperative. They end the book with this statement: "In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon" (313).

Waller, James. Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. 2/e. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Originally reviewed in 2011: Profound book

In the categories of this bibliography, this book could also be placed in with history, or more general social psychology. It is interdisciplinary.

This work shows why explorations of the nature of human nature are not just the stuff of ivory towers. It adds an evolutionary psychology element to previous discussions of genocide with good effect. One gets some of the ideas of Tooby, Cosmides, Sober and Wilson's "Unto others", Pinker, etc. in the picture. It is also well written and engages the reader emotionally. The evolutionary psychology, though, is only one fundamental factor among many. The author's point is to show all of the various factors that influence a potential actor in genocide, and the situational influences dealt with by social psychology loom large.

Nevertheless, there is an interesting lack of self-awareness of the use of a repeated concept. It is very common to refer to someone who commits an evil act as being inhuman. That dehumanizes the perpetrator. But as Mr. Waller so beautifully explains, it is well within ordinary human nature to have the potential to commit acts of extraordinary evil. So ... it may be evil, but it is not inhuman. Furthermore, the book explains that dehumanizing others is part of the process that can lead to genocide. In trying to characterize these evil acts, the author uses some of the same dehumanizing mental constructs that lead to such evil acts. Ironic, no?

But that is a minor point. It is quite customary to refer to evil acts as being inhuman. The book is excellent, if sobering.

Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Crown, 2019.

Originally reviewed in 2022: Addressing proximate emotions does not get to the root of the problem

This book is not written explicitly as a work of evolutionary psychology, but I am interpreting it from that perspective. It is a work of popular social psychology.

This book is a complex mix of science and advocacy. One the one hand, Zaki wants to describe accurately the state of social psychology relating to the human capacity for empathy. On the other hand, he wants to expand the median empathy levels among the general public (or at least readers of his book). Sometimes, these goals work at cross-purposes. Zaki effectively makes his basic point that we can take meaningful steps to make our social environment better, but to encourage us to take those meaningful steps, he minimizes the factors that constrain those empathy-expanding efforts.

To give an early example, Zaki starts off by suggesting that Darwinian fitness ought to select against altruism, but that altruism exists nevertheless, as proved by the fact that infants must be cared for by adults. He doesn't dwell on this issue long enough to review the finer points of his theory, so the reader does not know to what extent he accepts Darwinian explanations of behavior and what forms of natural selection he acknowledges.

The dominant attitude among evolutionary biologists since the 1960s has been to deprecate the generalized concept of group selection, but to allow for kin selection and reciprocal altruism. David Sloan Wilson has for decades advocated for the acceptance of what he calls Multilevel Selection Theory (MST), which includes both individual fitness and group fitness (the multiple levels). According to MST, altruism can only evolve in the context of group fitness, where some groups outperform other groups. To have this kind of group selection, there must be failed outgroups against which some groups succeed. Therefore, if this is how altruism comes into being (a big if), altruism can never be truly universal. We only have "us" if it is "us against them."

Zaki admits that empathy is the emotional proximate cause of human cooperation rather than its ultimate cause. Empathy helps individuals function well in groups that need to cooperate. His goal is to increase the average individual's capacity to feel empathy for others. He cites Peter Singer's book Expanding Circle to suggest that the ultimate goal is to increase our empathy to include the entire world. Singer for his part argues that we should expand our empathy across species lines to include animal rights. Zaki, toward the end of this book, argues that we should also have empathy for future generations, which might inspire us to take more actions to address climate change.

Does Zaki genuinely believe that empathy can expand that much, or is it just part of his advocacy, his aspirational appeal, to encourage us to increase our empathy at least a bit? That is not clear, and that question clouds his message. How seriously should I take his arguments? He admits that if someone believes that they can increase their empathy, they are more likely to be able to do so. There is a circular mixing of advocacy and science.

Zaki spends a good deal of the book arguing that empathy is not fixed. However, he admits that the research shows that each human individual has a "set point," a biologically built-in default capacity for empathy. His point is that we can increase our empathy beyond our set point with determination and practice. We can also shrink our capacity for empathy. He compares this empathy to intelligence, which he acknowledges has a genetic component, but which is also elastic and can be changed by social conditions. People can increase their intelligence by personal effort. As with empathy, people who believe that intelligence is fixed are less likely to try to increase their intelligence.

Zaki gives examples of how some people choose rationally to scale back their empathy. People whose job it is to do harm to other people, such as HR professionals who tell employees they are fired, will often protect themselves from their own trauma by blaming the victims. If you believe these victims deserve their misfortune, you are less troubled by delivering it.

The problem here is: what if, for the good of the social order, you do have to treat some people badly? Your position in the society pressures you to lower your empathy. If two nations go to war, they often whip their soldiers into a mental frame to attack by dehumanizing the enemy. The ultimate cause of fighting the war shapes the proximate mechanism of empathy. Encouraging troops to be more empathic isn't going to help your cause if it means that you lose the war and your enemy kills you and your fellow soldiers. (The title of the book itself is a paradox: how can you fight a war for kindness if one of the principles of war is to temporarily suspend your capacity for kindness?)

The contradiction is that, on the one hand, Zaki admits that there is an upper limit to empathic expansion, but on the other hand, he claims to want the empathy of our society to keep expanding across time and space. He wants us to care about unborn generations millions of years from now, but he admits that empathy can contract rapidly given the right social conditions. Even if we dramatically expand our empathy now, who is to say that those future generations will keep their empathy expanded for millions of years in their turn? Given the human biology of empathic set points, that seems highly implausible. It might be a good creed for secular salvation, but it is not good science.

Zaki is in the school of social psychology led by Carol Dweck. Her books push for the expansion of empathy and do not mention the possibility that it can shrink. In this regard, Zaki's version of the theory is superior to Dweck's, because he acknowledges that levels of empathy can contract. Even so, his advocacy for expanding empathy causes him to downplay just how limited that upward expansion can be. Against my arguments here, he could counter-argue that I, by downplaying the possibilities for expansion, might be discouraging people from trying to expand their empathy as much as they can.

I am taking a skeptical eye toward Zaki's aspirations for expanding empathy, but he does show that empathy can be expanded: he has inspirational stories of reformed skinheads, of inmates in prison taking literature classes to get in touch with their emotions, of police training for empathy which yields more calm on the streets. He demonstrates that we really can expand our empathy and that it can improve our lives. I don't want to deny that basic point.

One of Zaki's better chapters deals with people who are at risk from empathy burnout. Nurses in intensive care units surrounded by dying people, for example, are at high risk. Zaki argues that people in such stressful situations do best when they practice a discipline of detached concern. He mentions that some schools of Buddhism cultivate such a practice. Other religious traditions might have resources for self-care as well. Indeed, Zaki does not make this point, but one could argue that the point of religion is to provide a set of stories and practices for increasing our empathy.

Being a professor at Stanford, Zaki may be contractually obliged to describe cutting-edge technology which can help increase empathy. He describes virtual reality experiments that show that VR has a greater impact on empathy than written or spoken accounts. Autistic individuals can benefit from emotional apps on a Google Glass. It is possible to design social networks that help the emotionally vulnerable (though you still have to police for trolls).

Halfway through the book, Zaki explains that part of the reason for writing the book is that the average level of empathy in our society is declining. This decline is due in part to the major corporations that control much of the social media in our society. Those social media giants have discovered that people who are angry and spiteful spend more of their time online and provide more revenue for shareholders. Zaki is passionate in his plea for raising empathy because the general social trend for empathy is actually going in the other direction.

The difference between proximate versus ultimate causes is at the root of the problem of declining empathy. If levels of empathy are driven by the underlying social situation (such as when corporate stockholders are allowed to profit from the misery and hostility of others), then those ultimate social causes will continue to depress levels of the proximate emotion of empathy. Encouraging a few people to practice Buddhist detachment or use emotional support apps will not help the overall society if the ultimate driving forces of the social structure continue to push down our empathy and keep us at each other's throats.

Eisenberg, Gregg. Letting Go is All We Have to Hold Onto. Louisville, CO: Curved-Space Comedy, 2018.

Originally reviewed in 2020: Absurdist, Buddhist, and Scientific Jokes

This review is in the section of reviews called "theory of comedy," but the present book does not directly discuss the theory of comedy. Instead, it is a jokebook. I put it here because its jokes encourage me to contemplate the theory of comedy.

This small pocketbook is packed with jokes that have a leaning toward ideas from the Buddhist cultural tradition. The author describes himself as a Jewish-Buddhist standup comedian, or a standup philosopher, and there is a bit of the borscht belt in them as well. The jokes tend to be either specifically Buddhist, scientific, or generally metaphysical. After a while, they do circle back to common themes and setups, but all-in-all a good collection.

I am not an expert on Buddhist culture and theology, but I have gotten through an Alan Watts book or two, I have read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and I did spend a weekend once at a Zen Buddhist monastery in New York State. I am not unfamiliar with many of the concepts. You could say I know enough about the ideas culturally appropriate them, or to be culturally inappropriate about them.

From my experience, Buddhism, especially Zen, confronts practitioners with paradoxes. Part of the point, I believe, is to reject rational explanations for mystical experience. Also, the goal is often to negate the practitioner's sense of self, turning away from the instinctual preservation drives that motivate much of human behavior. Many Buddhist proverbs feature either a logical contradiction or a rejection of our in-born social status craving or both.

In the theory of humor that I have articulated in my blog on John Kennedy Toole Research (just google Leighton Toole Research, and follow the BlogSpot link), and in my book chapter in the book Theology and Geometry, I argue that there are two fundamental aspects of humor, a) a cognitive incongruity and b) a social aspect. An absurdist joke highlights the incongruity more than the social aspect, and put-down humor often highlights the social over the incongruous.

Because Buddhist ideas often deal with either paradoxes or social abasement, they easily supply the framework for jokes. Many koans have the structure of jokes, especially absurdist jokes. One famous question is: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Because clapping is a two-handed activity (barring variations such as slapping the thigh), just one hand cannot actually clap. Woody Allen easily riffed off that koan by claiming that he got kicked out of the Boy Scouts because he tried to start a fire with one stick rubbed together.

In Eisenberg's book, he uses the full range of both incongruity and social dynamics. Many of the jokes play off the fact that some quality that is not generally valued in the rest of society is highly valued within Buddhism. So there is the joke: "When I see how little progress I've made in my Buddhist practice lately, I feel emptiness inside" (69). Generally, when someone says they feel emptiness, it means that they are emotionally depressed. But with Buddhism's value on abasing the self, feeling emptiness inside is a good thing. The first part of the sentence cues the reader toward a negative, but the punchline flips the reader from the mundane value system to the Buddhist value system.

The Buddhist value on self abasement leads to paradox. The Zen master is held in high esteem, yet she achieves that high esteem by negating her self. Someone motivated by ambition for self enhancement within a Zen community has to strive toward self abasement. This leads to jokes such as: "I am so much more than just a guy sitting here stripping away his delusions of grandeur" (69). If you think you are so much more than that, then you are not a guy stripping away his delusions of grandeur at all. Another in this vein: "I always figured a little false humility is better than no humility at all" (134). False humility is in fact the state of having no humility at all.

Within some branches of Buddhism there is the concept of the altruistic master. The peak of enlightenment is nirvana, where the individual eliminates the desires of the self so successfully that the individual escapes from the cycle of suffering in the world. The Bodhisattva is a person who can reach nirvana, but who delays doing so to help others along the path. Therefore, those not close to nirvana are lower in status than those closer. This leads to jokes such as: "I want to become a Bodhisattva in this lifetime, and when I do, I'm taking all you shmucks with me" (227). By referring to others with disparagement, the speaker is far from enlightenment. The paradoxical social dynamic is built into Buddhism, and the joke merely highlights it.

The author also likes the mind-bending qualities of modern science and enjoys jokes that play with both Buddhist ideas and the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity in physics. The science jokes are few but good. For example: "The universe expanded 115 trillion miles in the time it took me to decide which shoes to wear today" (205).

So all-in-all a good joke book for those with an interest in this area. I applaud with one hand (and a knee).

Hurley, Matthew M., Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams. Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind. MIT Press, 2011.

Originally reviewed in 2018: Humor theory in the corner with a dunce cap

This review is also posted on my blog for John Kennedy Toole Research.

Admittedly, Hurley, Dennett, and Adams announce in the subtitle of this book that they are aiming for a target other than merely a theory of humor. But theories of humor do not exist in a vacuum: they are usually part of larger theories of psychology and human nature. This effort is not unusual. That having been said, these authors minimize the social, and especially the disparagement, aspect of the humor, although it should be noted that they don't specifically disparage it per se. Their belief—naturally their active belief—is that the exploration of humor gives them entry into a process within the human mind that helps propel general intelligence. In short, they argue that a truly intelligent computer would need a sense of humor.

(Now, they might counterargue that they have a definition for humor more narrow than mine, so within their narrow domain, their theory holds. They might then argue that they do not try to offer a theory for the broader domain that concerns me. I don't quite buy that argument, though it has some merits. See my discussion of Question #3 below.)

The book claims to be a new theory of humor; however, to me it is largely a very sophisticated and welcome update to Incongruity Theory. For example, the authors reject the theory of frames (Minsky) and the related theory of scripts (Attardo), but they put forward "mental spaces," which are dynamically created, light-weight frames in working memory. They then argue that the brain thinks using a lazy algorithm called "just in time spreading activation" or JITSA, using those mental spaces. If one uses the computer as a metaphor for the mind, one could say that they basically upgraded from the bulky design of Windows 98 to the light-weight, threaded architecture of Windows XP. To a cognitive scientist, it might be a big difference to go from scripts in long-term memory to activated mental spaces, but for the rest of us, it amounts to quibbling.

Now, to be fair, the theory is more sophisticated than the above computer analogy. For these authors, humor is generated by the discovery of a false committed active belief that was surreptitiously introduced into a mental space. For the paraprosdokian "I've had the most wonderful evening, but this wasn't it," the first part of the sentence leads the listener to form a mental space in which the speaker is referring to the present evening. However, that committed belief was inferred by the listener as a customary flattery. The second half of the sentence causes the mind to reevaluate that covert committed belief and discover that the speaker was not referring to the present evening after all. Snap! Because the mind has to comprehend the world on the fly, it is regularly discovering that some beliefs it committed to are in fact false. But again, to me this amounts to a refinement of the general Incongruity Theory of Humor.

The major problem with their theory is that they start with an isolated mind; whereas, humans are essentially social animals. Despite the fact that laughter (here a Duchenne belly laugh, not a polite laugh) is an involuntary mechanism and a social signal that is clearly contagious, they somehow argue that "Basic Humor" is a solitary activity of the isolated mind doing data-integrity maintenance on "committed beliefs." (For example, read pages 130-132.) They do modestly address the value of social capital (139), but that is about as far as it goes. In contrast, I fully agree with Gary Fine (1983): "... any adequate understanding of the dynamics of humor must include a social analysis" (Handbook of Humor Research, v. 1, 159).

During their review of earlier theories, Hurley and company acknowledge that Superiority Theory is the second strongest class of theories of humor behind Incongruity Theory, and they admit that it can offer insight into a large fraction of humor data, but then they proceed to minimize it. For example, when discussing Wyer and Collins, they wave off a need for the concept of diminishment (204). Why? Because it doesn't fit their goal of designing a new (non-social) artificial intelligence system that uses a sense of humor for data-integrity. To illustrate my point, here is an example from the book where they do discuss interpersonal humor:

Person A and B were wading across a river (151). (For the sake of pronouns, I will consider B male.) B slipped and fell in. If B had been genuinely and appropriately cautious, the authors argue that his fall would not have been funny to either A or B. However, A might have laughed at B because A may have attributed B's fall "to overzealousness or overconfidence, in which [B] hubristically assumed the task was easier than it proved to be."

My commentary: The authors argue that A's mirth was generated merely by the discovery of B's false belief that the crossing would be easy. The purpose of the laughter was to signal that A should helpfully point out the flaws in B's reasoning. But the use of the word "hubristically" indicates something deeper. B didn't just commit to a false belief, he apparently deserved that dunking in A's estimation.

We can highlight this by elaborating on the fictional scenario. Maybe B was the leader of the expedition and was lording his position over the others. Maybe the rest of the group thought it was crazy to cross the river at that spot, but B was insisting that the group had to cross there. The dunk in the river proved B wrong to the delight of A and the rest. Ha, that B, what a pompous ass! Crow is on the menu for B.

As I have stated earlier, the theory I support posits that a major function of humor within a social group is to adjust the social status hierarchy, specifically by diminishing the status of some member or members. It is a non-violent way of adjusting the dynamics of the group. In the typical group, high-status members enforce the group's rules for correct behavior, and their version of reality is the version acted upon by the group, so false committed beliefs are not usually limited to an isolated mind; instead, they are of deep concern to the whole group. For its part, self-deprecating humor allows the humorist to lower his or her own status, at times to improve the functioning of the group and group cohesion.

To further examine where Hurley and company have gone wrong, it is useful to know something about Dennett's philosophical work. Dennett calls the modern Theory of Mind "the Intentional Stance." The theory of mind is: we humans are able to perceive other beings in our universe, specifically other beings with minds, as having their own set of beliefs and intentions and mental states (143), and we can act accordingly. Children tend to develop a "theory of mind" or "intentional stance" around the age of four or five. You need a well-functioning intentional stance to be a good liar. Dennett had been promoting the intentional stance long before writers such as Alison Gopnik started promoting the theory of mind as a mainstream concept.

In this book, the authors state: "Using the intentional stance is how we manage our social lives, by modeling what other people believe" (144). That statement is at best very incomplete. We were a social species long before we evolved the ability to take an intentional stance. When I take my dog to the park to play with other dogs, it does not have an intentional stance, but it knows all about the dynamics of a pecking order, who is top dog and who is an underdog. We might manage some of our social behavior using an intentional stance, but we also manage it by establishing and negotiating status within a group, and the group status ranking system almost certainly predates the intentional stance by millions of years.

These authors claim that interpersonal humor is an "offspring" of their within-brain Basic Humor, but how we understand our world is very shared and social and always has been. To quote Penny from The Big Bang Theory, "Oh, so, you believe your friend, and your friend's wife and your own eyes over me?? Wow." To me, the emotional and psychological precursors to interpersonal humor very much predate the rich inner lives of homo sapiens with our intentional stances, complex mental spaces, and logical pre-frontal cortices. People call social play "kidding around" and "horsing around" because young goats and horses play, too.

To go back to our paraprosdokian, certainly the snap of surprise is triggered by the discovery that the "wonderful evening" was not the present evening of the utterance. But the zing that causes the laughter is generated by this new interpretation being a put-down. The speaker is disparaging the present evening, possibly breaking social decorum by challenging the evening's host, and doing so in a humorous mode that deflects a violent response. In 1974, Zilman and Bryant found that the intensity of humor was not related to the listeners sense of superiority but was greatest when the target of the put-down was perceived to have deserved it (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 10, pp. 480-488). This joke would be mean-spirited if the present evening had actually been pleasant, but it would be very funny if everyone else at the party had been thinking the same thing, but they were too polite to say it out loud.

Twenty Questions

I apologize for making this review overly long, but I would like to discuss relevant details. The authors early in the book posed twenty questions that any theory would have to address, and at the end of the book, they summarize their theory by answering them. In the following section I will discuss some of those answers. What I find amusing is that they stick to their theory in some answers, but other answers address some of their theory's shortcomings.

In the answers to question one and two, the authors stick to their theory. Question one is "Is humor an adaptation?" and question two is "Where did humor come from?" They maintain that, as our ancestors evolved more sophisticated brains, we had a greater need for data integrity checking, so there was selective pressure for that feature of the mind. They admit that laughter probably comes from the play panting similar to that displayed by chimps, but that it was co-opted by humor. Because chimps do not have a full Theory of Mind, "the breadth of humor that is due to social circumstance and others' perspectives (which is the bulk of humor) is lost to them, and presumably to all other species" (291). Again, the authors cannot see precursors to interpersonal humor without an intentional stance.

In question three, "Why do we communicate humor?" the authors finally offer an origin story for humor with which I can agree. "The communication of humor may have begun as a way of causing our conspecifics to know that we were only half-serious with them during mock-aggression and play" (291). I would argue that that is the origin of all humor, as a signal of playful non-aggression, which has been co-opted as a tool to negotiate status within human groups. The authors agree: "Later, laughter was co-opted for usage in more complex social circumstances, especially the mate-attracting display of intellect and the trading of social capital in various manners" (291). Thus, the widely observed social functions of humor sneak in as part of laughter's "trading of social capital." This scenario to my mind is the actual origin and one of the two major aspects of humor, the resolution of false committed beliefs being humor's other major aspect. The authors finish up this section on communication arguing that the sharing of jokes is an instance of the spreading of parasitic memes. (Dennett likes memetics, the poor dear!)

At the beginning of this essay, I said that these authors may be using a narrower definition of humor, and I think this section shows it. What I consider to be the origin of humor they limit to the origin of laughter. If one limits humor to being strictly the snap of a correction to a false belief, then much of what I consider to be humor is merely the somewhat related phenomena of using humor toward social ends. I believe this argument is wrong, because of the deep social nature of humor, especially its status challenging edge, but it is an argument one could make to reconcile the present text with my own position.

Question seven finally attacks my issues head on: "Why does humor often get used for disparagement?" I will quote their answer at length. "Putting someone down by humorously demonstrating an infirmity in their cognitive capacities efficiently makes the humorist and the addressed audience look superior in comparison, enlisting the audience as like-minded allies and at the same time making the humorist appear good natured, not just angry or aggrieved. This is a common use of humor in modern society, but not its original or even secondary purpose, which is more plausibly the demonstration of intellectual prowess (with or without a target or butt of the joke) to potential mates and allies" (292).

Notice that the authors go to great lengths to insist that disparagement is not even a secondary purpose of humor? I would agree that it is not secondary, but would suggest that employing humor toward social ends, such as adjusting the group status hierarchy, is, if not the primary driver, then at least one of the main drivers of the evolution of humor. And non-violently adjusting social status within the group preceded humor's function for data integrity or for displaying intelligence. And I'm not just kidding around.

Question thirteen is: "Why can humor be used as a social corrective?" In their answer, the authors limit the correction to errors in logic and inference, but a major type of correction that they ignore is the enforcement of social norms. Why not? Such behavior, in my humble opinion, would inch too close to group selection theory for Dennett. Boyd and Richerson, stay away!

On the positive side, Dennett and company are proponents of applying evolutionary theory to human psychology, so at least their theory has well-thought-out evolutionary justifications. But again, Dennett's agenda intrudes. I believe he is not a fan of David Sloan Wilson's Multilevel Selection Theory, which adds group selection to evolution and could help provide the needed explanatory framework for the evolution of such a social phenomenon as humor and laughter. The 2005 paper by Gervais and Wilson, "The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach" (Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 80, pp. 395-430) is briefly discussed in this book, but its main point about group selection is neglected. We are left with humor as a data-integrity process largely in a social deprivation tank. It is good as far as it goes, but it misses one of the two core aspects of humor.

Mulkay, Michael J. On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society. Blackwell, 1988.

Originally reviewed in 2015: Excellent philosophical analysis of humor

With recent books on the nature of humor, such as Weems's book Ha!, it is useful to go back to classics. This book by Mulkay is, to me, the best book of its time approaching the topic from a philosophical and psychological perspective. Both his philosophy and his psychology are perceptive and well-thought out. Even the jokes are funny.

The basic thesis of the book is that human discourse has two modes: the serious and the humorous. In serious mode, the participants assume that there is an external reality about which they can make statements, and that that reality is internally consistent. There is only one correct version of reality. In serious discourse, if the parties cannot agree on their interpretation of reality, one of them is—at least to some degree—wrong. Even philosophers of post-modernism and relativism end up assuming a consistent, unitary reality, even while they are articulating the opposite conclusion. You have to make that assumption in order to engage in a serious discourse.

In humorous mode, no such assumption of a consistent and unitary reality is necessary. Humor is often generated by sharply contrasting different versions of reality, or by allowing ambiguity in which multiple interpretations are hovering in the air without resolution. Later researchers such as Weems can give you brain studies in which neuroscientists show which brain structures are involved in trying to resolve the competing interpretations. But the basic distinction in discourse between serious and humorous still stands as valid.

Mulkay then goes on to show how humorous discourse has a particular linguistic structure that allows it to be effective. He critiques earlier humor analysts for not fully getting some of the aspects of the jokes that they had attempted to analyze. And yes, some of his investigations are rather funny.

Beyond this basic philosophical and linguistic analysis, Mulkay investigates the social psychology of humor. He shows that social structures can be analyzed in terms of linguistic discourse, and that a social relationship can itself contain a structural joke. Some social uses of humor are an attempt by participants to deal with or counteract the jokes played on them by their social context. Some researchers have postulated that humor is always subversive, but Mulkay shows convincingly that most humor is in fact supportive of the dominant social structure, whether that dominance is by employment status, class, race, or gender. (Maybe that is why comedy rarely wins the Oscar, it is too servile.)

As far as I can tell, this book was a major advance in humor studies, and it deserves a close read even today. Mulkay ends with a suggestion that perhaps we could build a society in which the ambiguities of humor become the standard serious mode, and the unitary worldview becomes the ancillary mode of discourse. I do not think that is possible or desirable, but the rest of the book is top-notch.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010 (Tenth Anniversary Edition, 2020.)

Originally written in 2022: Important Critique of the Current Social Order

If you are wondering why conservatives get into a panic about discussions of systemic racism, this is the book that explains it. Since the George Floyd killing in 2020, I have tried to read more books discussing racism. Frankly, some are not well reasoned. This book, more than the others by far, investigates genuine causes to situate racism within today's American society. If you read one book to get a handle on why people are up in arms about race, this is the one.

Alexander does an excellent job of showing that current laws and practices in the United States allow for the formation of a racial caste system that is stable, paradoxically, despite most people not taking any actions that they believe are racist. Affirmative action in fact reinforces caste system. Our current system may even be every bit as cruel for people caught up in its trap as the old Jim Crow system of the early 20th century. It will also be much more difficult to disassemble, in part because most people honestly feel that they are colorblind.

As you can imagine, explaining this paradoxical system takes a great deal of work. Most of the work has been done by Ronald Reagan's War on Drugs. Important parts of it were put into place by the Supreme Court soon after Ronald Reagan was elected. The effort to build it has been bipartisan: Bill Clinton eagerly added to it. Even Barack Obama did not disassemble it.

The basic idea is to have high penalties for the possession of illegal drugs. Also necessary is the Supreme Court decisions first that the police have wide discretion in whom they target for arrest and second that the police cannot be charged with racial bias in their selective application of the drug laws. Next, prosecutors are given wide discretion in whom they charge and for what offenses. Because potential sentences are crippling, defendants frequently plea to lesser charges, even if they probably would not have been convicted in a trial. This creates large numbers of convicted felons, especially focused in the black community. Laws are then passed that prohibit felons from voting, among other lifelong handicaps.

The end result is that a large fraction of the African American public is disenfranchised and trapped in a second-class status. Because some Whites are caught up in the system, and because there are exceptional Blacks such as Oprah and Barack Obama who have escaped the system, the social order does not appear to be racist. That appearance blunts any sense of moral outrage to drive change.

The overt racism of Derek Chauvin or the killers of Ahmaud Arbery is unusual and is reviled by a large fraction of our society. The caste system of mass incarceration, which on average has racist outcomes, operates smoothly out of sight even though most people are outraged by overt racism. People riot over George Floyd, but they don't riot over a couple of Supreme Court decisions from the 1980s, when perhaps they should.

If one asks, why hasn't this been stopped, the answer might come in Alexander's prescription for fixing the system. Dismantling the racial caste system might involve taking apart the entire economic order. It is not clear that such a radical revolution of collective liberation could work. We might all be standing in a line for the soup kitchen or be left with a dystopian chaos of violence or both. One can see why many participants in the social order have chosen to continue a system that is cruel but which works.

From what I have heard, Alexander now teaches at Union Theological Seminary. That does not surprise me. Her solution to the problem has a religious, born-again quality for social change.

NOTE: If you read the tenth anniversary edition, I recommend reading the introduction AFTER you read the rest of the book. The introduction updates the main argument, and reading the main argument first makes sense. The introduction should have been an afterword.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Originally reviewed in 2009: Classic Leftist Critique of Capitalism

Harry Braverman was an intellectual firmly placed in the Marxist Left. I don't know much about him personally, but this book indicates that he earned a living as a typesetter. He was clearly proud of being part of the proletariat.

What I like about this book is that it is relevant not only for Marxism but also for non-Marxists. Braverman explains well the nature of classical economics, coining the term "cash nexus." Classical economics can only assign values to things in the human world if they travel through the cash nexus. Something that may be bad for society in general, such as a high divorce rate, might be calculated by economists and business planners as a good thing. The benefits of marriage often are free to their beneficiaries, while divorce forces more of the worth of the newly separated individuals into the cash economy, thereby generating revenue for capital markets and the governments that fund themselves through taxes on cash transactions. Bottom line: what is good for Amazon and the federal government might not be good for me or you.

Braverman's split between social goods and economic goods is important for anyone wishing to live a happy life. Our modern capitalist world values exponential economic growth, regardless of the happiness or true well-being of the participants in the economic sphere. When we make personal, social and political decisions, we must regularly ask ourselves, does this act increase happiness or social peace? I may be unhappy in the higher paying job. My higher-paying job may include so many costs that the overall worth of my life and social relationships may have dropped.

Clean water in the faucet means that I don't have to pay for bottled beverages. An adequately funded public health system means that I don't have to fear epidemics and that my society is not hobbled by high mortality rates.

One can see that pro-business environmentalists promote things like the Prius—you pay a lot of money for the privilege of using little gasoline—over things like living close enough to your work place to walk, which actually uses much less energy. The Prius drives through the cash nexus, while the walker ambles quietly around it.

When my wife and I had children, she stayed home to care for them. Did I think less of her for not working outside the home? I do not believe that I did. I recognized that her benefit to our social group was simply flowing outside of the cash nexus. The benefits were real and valued. Lessening one's use of the cash nexus requires discipline, especially because our modern society emphasizes using it and lures one into passing through it.

Indeed, the assumptions upon which our economy is based include exponential growth in the value passing through the cash nexus. News reporters fret when the annual rate of growth of the cash economy is less than two percent. It is an open question as to whether the liberal democracies of modern society can survive without exponential economic growth.

Dickey, Christopher. Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South. Crown Publishers, 2015.

Originally reviewed in 2016

This book presents the career of a British diplomat, Robert Bunch, serving in the United States during the 1850s and 1860s. He was the consul from Britain to the port of Charleston, SC. His assignment started out as a minor post compared to that of the Ambassador to the United States; however, when the South formed the Confederacy, he became nearly a defacto Ambassador to the Confederacy in the middle of a delicate wartime situation. Bunch executed his office brilliantly and was a major agent in keeping Britain from recognizing and supporting the Confederacy. For a history, it perhaps sacrifices detail for popular appeal, but it is both enlightening and entertaining.

Dickey for his part dug through the records of the correspondence from Bunch to the Foreign Office. He can document that Bunch's messages reached the highest circles of the British government and informed policy. Evidence of Bunch within the United States indicated that he succeeded in hiding his hostility to slavery. Indeed, the United States government came to see him during the war as a southern sympathizer and would likely have arrested him or worse had they gotten hold of him. The hostility of the U.S. toward him helped convince southerners that he was on their side, though his communiques prove that he strenuously opposed slavery and urged Britain to avoid offering the Confederacy support.

One aspect of the history of this era that I learned from this book was that the United States assisted in the slave trade from Africa even after making it formally illegal but before the American Civil War. The British had outlawed slavery within the British Empire early in the nineteenth century, that much I knew. But the British had also determined to halt the export of slaves from Africa in general. Because the British dominated intercontinental shipping and possessed global naval hegemony at the time, their decision meant that the international slave trade was greatly suppressed.

However, the British respected the privacy of American-flagged vessals. A slave ship that sailed under the U.S. flag would not be stopped and searched by British war ships. However, the United States officially banned the slave trade. If a slave ship flew the American flag, it could be stopped and searched by American war ships, if they were present.

Mariners who wanted to trade in slaves would, if chased by British ships, raise an American flag to avoid search, but they would not raise the American flag if in sight of American war ships. The United States government could and did turn a blind eye to the slave trade by not having American war ships patrolling African waters. British commanders, who suspected American flagged ships of carrying slaves, were powerless to stop them without causing an international incident. A great deal of mid-nineteenth century slave trading occurred under the negligent inaction of the American government.

Some American war ship captains took seriously their duty to halt slave trading. They would sometimes fly a British flag when approaching a slave ship. When the ship raised the American flag, the war ship would switch to American colors and force a search of the ship. Several illegal slave ships were caught in this way.

Another interesting analysis in this book was the economics and politics of trading slaves versus trading cotton. In Virginia, plantation owners profited by encouraging slaves to have large families. The surplus slaves could then be sold to the cotton-producing regions. If more slaves were imported from Africa, they would cause the price of slaves to drop for Virginians.

Conversely, the cotton producing states feared that the British were expanding cotton production within their own colonies. They felt that their only hope for a future market for U.S. cotton was to keep the U.S. price low. Importing more slaves would help lower costs and keep their cotton competitive. Politicians from cotton producing states therefore wanted to reopen the slave trade.

The politicians forming the Confederacy needed Virginia politically, and they also wanted recognition from the British government, so they decided not to make the slave trade legal. (The British for their part did not take seriously southern laws against the slave trade, because the Confederacy did not have the resolve to enforce them.) This whole aspect of the history of the South was new to me: even within the Confederacy the issue of the international slave trade was divisive.

Anyway, the book is well-written, informative, and a fast read. Bunch was a gutsy guy who pulled off his assignment. Recommended.

Fischer, David Hackett. Washington's Crossing, Oxford UP, 2004.

Originally reviewed in 2007

This book is a history of the crossing of the Delaware River by Washington's army and the subsequent two battles of Trenton and Princeton. The subtext of the book, however, is that George Washington was an exemplar of management fashions current in early 21st century American business. His army was a Learning Organization, where the commander-in-chief listened to his subordinates and kept his strategy flexible. The British, meanwhile, were commanded with an inflexible, top-down style, and the head of the British forces was absent, enjoying the comforts of New York City.

One point documented is that the Hessians were not incompetent drunks; rather, they were a well-trained, seasoned force that was fairly beaten. By comparison, the victorious American army was ragtag. Because of the loss, the British newspapers claimed that the Hessians were drunk and blamed them.

A major theme of the book is that luck plays a large role in the critical affairs of history. Everything went wrong with the crossing of the Delaware, and the result was a complete victory. Washington was hoping to catch the Hessians unaware, so he asked for no skirmishes before the attack. Despite those orders, skirmishes had been occurring daily, and their frequency had desensitized the Hessian sentries. Washington hoped for a dawn strike, but the attack didn't begin until hours later. Most of the river transports failed to show.

Most crucially, Washington had hoped for good weather, but a blizzard struck, and it hid his approaching forces until the instant of their attack. (More American troops froze to death than were killed in the fighting.) If everything had gone the way Washington had hoped, the Hessians would have easily seen his army coming and would have defeated it handily.

Another point made in the book is that even when the commander of an occupying force means well, the ground troops sometimes behave so poorly that the local populous is motivated to continue the rebellion. The harsh Hessian occupation of New Jersey helped fuel emotional outrage that energized the American revolution.

All in all, well written.

Sedgewick, Augustine. Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of our Favorite Drug. Penguin Press, 2020.

Originally reviewed in 2020: The Factory System on the Land

Sedgewick, the author, has a Ph.D. in History, and this is an academic book. He uses coffee as the focus for what amounts to a review of the Atlantic sphere of trade and the history of Central America. He has many interests and sees that history in a multiplicity of ways, so there are many tangents. I personally liked all of the tangents and think his observations were well done. Other members of my book club found it too sprawling.

Sedgewick does a good job turning a multiplicity of facts into a story. He focuses on one coffee planter, James Hill, who had an important role in one country, El Salvador. (The end of the book indicates that Hill's grandson supplied the personal primary sources about the family.) As his story builds, Sedgewick brings in the historical context gradually. For the market in the United States, he focuses on one corporation: the Hills Brothers of San Francisco (no relation to James Hill, the El Salvadoran planter, or, for that matter, James J. Hill, the railroad baron from Minnesota).

With these players as his narrative core, he weaves the history of the Atlantic trading world, including Portuguese slavery in Brazil, the economic hegemony the United State obtained over Latin America, the industrial revolution in England, the coffee culture of the American Civil War, the brutal plantation system in Central America, the rise of Marxism and its influence within those revolutionary circles, the international economic dynamics of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and more.

The story is a vast canvas upon which the humble coffee bean and the ambitious James Hill travel. Sedgewick's historical understanding is informed by such thinkers as Eric Hobsbawm, who is prominent on the left, and his writing comes out of the school of treating the entire global trading realm as one interconnected entity. Coffee and Mr. Hill give him the narrative focus to keep the reader from getting lost in the panorama. Some readers do get lost, though, despite the narrative structure.

If you are in the school of history that objects to raising up a "Great Man" of history and looks instead at folk art and broad social movements, this book may not be your cup of tea, so to speak. James Hill is a narrative focus, but he then becomes a great man, the enterprising Englishman who marries into a local landowning family and helps turn El Salvador into a coffee producing machine. Even though there are non-white actors in the book, such as the revolutionary leader El Negro, they become in their turn "great men" standing up to the capitalist juggernaut.

Personally, I have been fascinated by the energy dynamics within human societies for a long time. In high school, I read the book Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin. (Each decade, poor Rifkin sees another apocalyptic development on the horizon and writes another book about the sky falling.) Entropy shows how the laws of thermodynamics can be used as a framework for understanding human activities and was written at a time of oil shortages. A social system can be seen as a vast engine, using energy and resources to maintain itself and change. Sedgewick frames his history in these terms and explores how that Gospel of Energy influenced the thought of the 19th century. For those who dislike the academic nature of the book, the digression into thermodynamics is the worst part of the book, but for me, it tied the book together nicely.

The book highlights the exploitation of the workers who pick the coffee, but it also shows that "the global coffee trade as an economic engine" depends on keeping the labor part of the inputs as depressed as it can be. The author is sympathetic to the suffering of the workers, and he offers a gesture toward the concept of food sovereignty at the end of the book, but it is not clear that universal food sovereignty would work as a foundation for a global coffee trade.

Post-script: it is with some schadenfreude that I learned from this book that the early Fair Trade certification effort did not solve the problem of hunger and poverty among coffee harvesting workers. It may have helped the owners of the small farms, but the workers on those small farms were still eating hand to mouth. Therefore, I am not a scoundrel for having bought coffee that was not "fair trade." Hah.

Thaler, Richard H. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. Norton, 2015.

Originally reviewed in 2016: Memoir of a pioneer of behavioral economics theory

What shocked me about Thaler's story is that modern economists—starting in the 1930s, but definitely from the 1950s onward—built their economic models upon an idealized model of human behavior that has no bearing upon reality. Consequencely, the experts who think they know how to manage our trillion-dollar economy actually have no idea what they are doing. Hence the economic collapse of 2007.

I even start thinking of conspiracy theories when I think of how badly economic theories are grounded. Did the economists of the 1950s through the present day purposefully insist on economic models that favored those who control the means of finance knowing full well that they were fictions? Considering that the economic collapse of 2007 ended up favoring the monied class and accelerating structural wealth inequality, one has to wonder. My bet, though, is that it has more to do with experts being too much in love with their equations to check to see if those equations had a connection to reality.

Thaler describes how repeatedly he ran into a situation where his ideas would seem radical and crazy to economists and obvious and passe to psychologists. Thaler does a good job of pointing out that many of the basic ideas which behavioral economists have developed recently were foreshadowed by ideas in the works of Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes. Behavioral economics is not some radical new economics; rather, it is a return to older, more practical approaches.

According to Thaler, part of the resistance to the ideas of behavioral economics is that they are difficult to model using mathematics. Modern economists insist on mathematical rigor, so they have often rejected reality-based ideas because they didn't fit into their mathematical framework. This situation is a bit like the situation in biology, where mathematical models of evolution put forward by Hamilton made it difficult to argue for the existence of behaviors that we can see daily in our fellow humans.

Considering that many of the eggheads whose economic theories have messed up our modern economy received the Nobel Prize in Economics, the least the Swedes could do is give Thaler a Nobel for proving them wrong.

Post-2016 election postscript: Now we have elected a president one of whose planks is to rollback Dodd-Frank and other protections on the financial markets put in place after the financial collapse. God help us all.

Post-2017 postscript: The Swedes did give Thaler the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017.

Post-2023 bank collapse postscript: The rollback of Dodd-Frank did cause the collapse of regional banks such as Silicon Valley Bank. Trump also insisted on the Federal Reserve pumping up the money supply in 2017, and that caused much of our current inflation. Who could have seen that coming? Uh ... everyone.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Knowledge and Politics. Free Press, 1975.

Originally reviewed in 2007: Deep ideas, difficult writing

Roberto Unger comes politically out of the Brazilian Left. This book, published in 1975, is a distillation of his philosophy of liberalism. The entire book is dense, but worth the effort. The introduction is a summation of the entire book, so it is even denser, but gives Unger's core argument in a brief 20 pages.

The core thesis of the book is that the political realm should allow for human freedom, but that the goal should be to allow human's the freedom to fulfill their human nature. Looking back on the position from a distance of thirty years, it anticipates the resurgence of the idea that there is a stable human nature. In Steven Pinker's Blank Slate (2002), he criticizes liberal philosophy for giving too much credence to the claim that humans have no fixed nature at all. Evolutionary Psychology, to which Pinker adheres, tries to reestablish a stability to human nature rooted in ideas from evolutionary biology. Unger's political philosophy anticipated this movement by about 20 years.

I read this book in an undergraduate course in social theory along with works by John Rawls, Bruce Ackerman and Robert Nesbit. In my opinion, Unger was by far the superior thinker in that group (though the work of John Rawls is undeniably classic). Unger went on to write many more dense treatises, which I have not read.

Gardner, Martin. The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

Originally reviewed in 2012: A gentle walk through Gardner's personal philosophy and religious belief

Martin Gardner was best known as the author of decades of math columns in Scientific American. He was also known for his many collections of essays on science, the history of science, and the philosophy of science. He was active in efforts to debunk claims of pseudoscience, such as those of paranormalists and those rejecting biological evolution. This book lays out, more or less systematically, the facets of Gardner's own personal philosophical position. It is both illuminating of the context of Gardner's writings, and it is a gentle walk through many topics of philosophy.

In philosophy, the topics he covers include solipsism, pragmatism, relativism, determinism, and Marxism. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book is that Gardner was a theist. Many active skeptics are professed as either agnostic or atheist, but Gardner defends his theism systematically. Nearly half the book is taken up with his defense of his position on many theological issues, especially immortality of the soul.

Gwyn, Douglas. Apocalypse of the Word: the Life and Message of George Fox. Friends United Press, 1986.

Originally reviewed in 2006

This book was recommended to be by a traveling Quaker scholar, and I agree: it is worth the read.

This text studies George Fox and his theology from a more traditionally Christian viewpoint. In particular, Fox seemed to believe that once one became a fully convinced Friend, one no longer lived in sinfulness. The objective was to try to practice Heaven on Earth. Fox also believed that people were incapable of deriving moral feelings from reason alone. Any indication that a person was capable of moral feelings indicated the influence of the divine. This position is very much at variance from Puritan theology.

Other philosophers and theologians have made a distinction between divinely inspired love and moral feelings derived from earthly reason. Fox did not. If he could discern morality in people from other cultures, he ascribed it to the inner influence of God, which he called the Inner Light or Inner Christ. In part because of this belief, Quakerism developed a strong tradition of universalism, "seeing that of God in everyone." Most Quaker literature emphasizes universalism and an avoidance of theological doctrine. One Quaker saying is, "Theology divides, action unites."

Quaker universalists also tend to downplay the orthodox Christian concepts of the resurrection of Christ and the focus on sins, forgiven or otherwise. Many contemporary American Friends are more Hicksite (universalist) than Christo-centric.

This book shows the degree to which Fox was focused on sin, redemption, and an apocalypse, though it was perhaps a personal or community apocalypse. With inner convincement, one could as an individual or a group arrive at that state of being "on Earth as it is in Heaven." In this way, Fox is shown to be closer to other Christian traditions than to a more universalist tradition.

Haught, John F. God after Darwin: a Theology of Evolution. 2nd Ed. Westview Press, 2008.

Originally reviewed in 2011

One might expect from this title a book that gave the history or sociology of religion's leaders and their responses to Darwin and the subsequent theory of evolution. This is not a book like that. An excellent book of that sort is: Summer for the Gods, by Edward Larson.

Instead, this book is a work that lays out a theology which is compatible with and informed by a version of the theory of evolution, and a Roman Catholic theology at that. Haught argues that theologies that reject evolution are themselves intrinsically bad theologies, and the fact that they conflict with evolution is a signal that they have problems that go deeper than that conflict with science.

Haught rejects as invalid a philosophical position that one might consider reasonable: that of dualism (115). With dualism, reconciling evolution and an all-loving just God are easy. The temporal world is a place of suffering. The hereafter is a place of love and justice. If life was unfair to you due to misfortune or evil, a just God can judge and make things fair in the end. As Haught points out, that line of reasoning argues that the tangible world is not always a nice place, and it is hard to reconcile the creator of this world with the just God who sorts things out in an afterlife. This line of reasoning could be summed up as: God is all-loving, but in this world, he is ineffectual. You have to wait for an afterlife to get justice mixed with mercy and forgiveness, etc.

Haught's solution is that this world is in continual creation, and it is evolving toward perfection. So the temporal world itself will eventually be 'saved,' though there is a lot of nastiness on the way there. He references Teilhard and Whitehead's process theology. Haught presents the idea of an infinitely loving God as being "self-emptying" (53).

The problem with this line of theology is that one has to soft-pedal evil. Sure there is evil in the world, but if you just take a step back, the panorama of beauty balances out the evil (136). This has the absurd conclusion that Auswitz isn't so bad as long as you can only see it from a great distance. Dualism starts to look better when you work through the implications of this position.

What I find especially noteworthy is how this theology is not out of step with certain strands of Catholic theology going back to the Renaissance. In The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, by Paul Oskar Kristeller, one can find a theological position that could have been included in this book without seeming out of place. For example, "The perfection of the world corresponds to the perfection of God" (63). "Consequently, the perfection of a thing is not given at once along with its mere existence, but in so far as each thing tends toward the fullness of being as its natural goal, it is destined from the outset for perfection and must at some time actually reach it" (64). Ficino was also focused on beauty and downplayed the existence of evil.

This book about post-Darwinian God is a fairly traditional Catholic theology. It is a possible, viable way to reconcile a belief in God with the results of modern science. That doesn't mean that it is the only possible theology or that it is necessarily the Right One, but it works. One just has to stomach the beautification of evil.

Ingle, H. Larry. First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Originally reviewed in 2006

Ingle has written what some today consider the most comprehensive biography of George Fox, one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. As the title indicates, he is usually considered the founder of Quakerism, but that is a bit of a stretch.

One thing that this biography clearly shows is that Fox could be a very difficult person, and that he and many of today's Friends might not accept each other. He was combative, trying to shock people out of their religious senses to see and follow a new practice.

Friends have been distinguished over the centuries for supporting leadership by women more than other religious groups. They have been distinguished for being tolerant of other faiths. In the United States, Friends tend to be fairly bourgeois, wealthy and reserved in behavior. The religious expression tends to be muted, intellectual, and tentative. Fox exemplified some of these social behaviors, but was entirely opposite for others. He did support women's leadership and religious toleration, but his style of religion was perhaps closer to modern Evangelicals and Pentacostals than modern Friends, and many of his converts were poor.

Things that I learned: 1) That Fox was a lot closer to Oliver Cromwell and the English revolution than is currently thought today. 2) That Quakerism did not initially make any headway with some ethnic groups, such as the Scots. 3) That Fox almost unilaterally imposed rules that gave women more power within Monthly Meetings, causing many meetings to leave the Society and become Baptist churches. 4) That Fox was not poor himself, but had some means and property, though modest. 5) That in the first generation of Quakers, Fox was only one of a half dozen leaders, but that he was the only early leader with a strong enough physical constitution to survive harsh imprisonment to carry on the movement to a second generation.

Worth the effort if one is interested in Quaker history, but too demanding if one is not so motivated.

Bell, Ronald W. The Nihilistic Perspective of John Kennedy Toole. Masters Thesis, CSU, Dominguez Hills, 2000.

Most recent version of review in 2020: Negative Opinion

I have a negative opinion of this paper. Leave it at that. Dr. Bell threatened me with a civil lawsuit over my evaluation of his scholarship. Make of that what you will.

A related entry from my John Kennedy Toole Research blog, in 2021:

Title: Ignatius as a Person Being Laughed at

You could call this the second in my series on "the lack of humor in Confederacy."

When I first started doing research on A Confederacy of Dunces, I trudged through all of the Amazon reviews of the book, to see if anyone there had already put forward my ideas about Chaucer's influence on Toole. One of the approximately one thousand reviews argued passionately that Ignatius Reilly was clearly a person with a mental illness. To that reviewer, the book was an extended exercise in laughing at a mentally ill person and his misfortune. Shame on all of us. This perspective is similar to Patteson and Sauret's third Ignatius, as I described in my blog entry of September 1, 2020.

Recently, I had an email exchange with Ron Bell, who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Confederacy. He mentioned that he does not find the book funny; rather, he sees it as tragic, and because of that, as well as some other reasons, he argues that Toole himself was a nihilist. While I disagree with his overall argument about nihilism, I do agree with Dr. Bell that the reader is encouraged to laugh at Ignatius. Ignatius is ridiculed and expelled from his community, one step ahead of the guys with the straitjackets. To me, the story would be tragic if he were caught and committed, but he is a slapstick hero who, though humiliated, has escaped to bluster another day.

Toole makes Ignatius just preposterous and difficult enough that we join in the laughter at his expense, but as Patteson and Seurat argue, there are three versions of Ignatius. The first is the crusader for theology and geometry, which is how Ignatius describes himself. Then there is the pompous fool, as portrayed by the narrator. But there is a third Ignatius who is emotionally vulnerable and pitiable. Seen from Ignatius's private point of view, as someone who is hiding from the humiliations of the world, one could read Confederacy and not find it funny.

Beste, Helga. "What's that, Crazy?" zur Funktion verrückter Charaktere bei John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Marilynne Robinson und Leslie Marmon Silko. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2003.

Originally reviewed in 2010

This book is in German and is Ms. Beste's dissertation from Heidelberg in 2001. Beste compares the use of madness in Toole's Confederacy, Heller's Catch-22, Robinson's Housekeeping, and Silko's Ceremony.

In chapter 2, she uses as a framework for madness the theory put forward in Hope Landrine's The Politics of Madness (1992), which uses these four criteria: 1) persons considered mad must behave other than those around them expect, 2) they must be essentially not criminal, 3) they must nevertheless be seen as dangerous or a threat by those around them, and 4) they eventually need the attention of special personnel who can return them to "normality."

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore the themes of separation and confinement from Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1965) in different contexts. In chapter 3, Beste explores how each book uses separation and confinement in space, comparing in detail how Ignatius's isolation can be seen as a parody of Boethius's confinement in prison (57-59). Even the book's scenes are isolated, with the location and time always changing from one to the next.

Chapter 4 examines separation and confinement in time, with Ignatius's insistence on anachronism. Beste analyzes Toole's representation of time closely, showing that a scene without a time reference is often placed between scenes with known time constraints, and that except for chapter 13, no scene seems to occur simultaneously with any other (99-101). She points out that no chapter lasts more than 24 hours, and she speculates on Toole's intentional use of classical dramatic unities (103). The strict separation of physical locations from scene to scene corresponds to the strict separation in time of each scene and the strict adherence to a 24-hour unity in each chapter. Ignatius's connection to the medieval era is both a flight from the present and something that confines him, that keeps him from participating in the present.

Chapter 5 examines Foucault's themes in terms of communication. Beste shows that Ignatius usually does not have genuine dialog with others. His mother doesn't really listen to his story of the bus, and he doesn't care. He shouts at the TV and the film screen. He is only comfortable in situations where he controls the speech. Both of the crusades fail because of his lack of ability to listen and dialog: the workers abandon him when they see that he is not listening to Gonzalez, and at the gay party, he is shouted down and humiliated. The only person whose communication he compliments is Myrna (the squirrel/rat).

In conclusion, Beste sees the meaning of Confederacy as positive: "Ignatius scheint am Ende des Romans tatsächlich den Weg aus separation und confinement gefunden zu haben ... " (174). There is an appendix from pages 203-215 with a chart of scene and time presentations (Zeitgestaltung) for Confederacy which provides evidence for Beste's conclusions about scene separation. One disappointment in this study is that Beste does not discuss in detail the history of madness in relation to Genius. Starting with Ficino in the Renaissance, continuing with Burton in English (to say nothing of Shakespeare), and kept alive by the Romantics, there is a long tradition of associating genius with melancholy and other mental illnesses. Aside from a few references (2, 5), Beste steers away from this topic, which Toole likely knew about and which he may have been intentionally referencing or parodying. In general, a well-done analysis.

Gardner, Carolyn Patricia. Comedy of Redemption in Three Southern Writers. Ph.D. Diss. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1994.

Originally reviewed in 2010

This dissertation uses the Christian Comedy theory of Ralph C. Woods to study the redemptive aspects of three novels: Faulkner's The Unvanquished, Percy's Moviegoer, and Toole's Confederacy. A Christian Comedy celebrates disorder and lacks a hero capable of resolving the plot. Disorder is redeemed by grace that comes not from above, but from the mundane world below. Gardner sees all three novels as having a young man and an afflicted young woman laying down their pride and receiving redemption (99). Bakhtin's theory of Carnival is also mentioned.

The third chapter examines Confederacy. She describes Confederacy as the Monty Python version of the Divine Comedy (102). Ignatius is a holy fool. Gardner notes he is the sole source of chaos (100), and she compares him to Ignatius of Antioch, despite the profound lack of fit between the two. She explores Ignatius as a symbolic Academic. She misinterprets the references to Batman (117), arguing erroneously that Batman works within a hierarchy rather than outside of one. "What we finally see in Toole's book is grace coming not through a hierarchy of scholars but in a confederacy of dunces" (118). She discusses Ignatius's attitude toward women and the womb motif (125-130). Gardner points out that Ignatius does not make a Boethian attempt to be free of Fortuna's wheel (121). She discusses Ken Toole's own circumstances and the relation of Thelma Toole to the characters in the book (134-135). She discusses the issue of the Eucharist and the lack of feasts and meals in the book (139-141).

An interesting observation is that both Confederacy and The Neon Bible lack healthy food and sex. Ignatius and Mrs. Levy both enjoy solitary sexual pleasure, and food is often consumed alone (140); however, she unconvincingly claims that communion is the controlling metaphor for the book because it is absent (105). She sees the final page of the novel to be hopeful, with Ignatius finally feeling gratitude and receiving redemption (142-148). Flawed, but with many fine observations. Gardner's "Midst great Laughter" article is a compact revision of chapter three except that it loses the reference to Bakhtin and the discussion of Ignatius as The Bad Academic. Reading this thesis is unnecessary when one can obtain the article version of the text.

Gatewood, Jessica J. Decoding the Body: Meaningful Corpulence in "A Confederacy of Dunces". M.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 2007.

Originally reviewed in 2012

This thesis examines Confederacy through the theoretical lens of Stallybrass and White, who use Foucault's ideas to interpret the meaning of fat in our society. The fat body is transgressive and the Other. In our bourgeois culture, "The dominant class's ability to emotionally separate and thus regulate the body ... becomes a sort of [cultural] capital ..." (4). Democracy is politically egalitarian, but it continues elitism encoded in manners, such as controlling consumption. She argues that Toole disrupts cultural constructions of the fat body. Ignatius comes from lower class, but he aspires to high culture. His fat body betrays his cultural origin and prevents his admission to high culture, while his educated mind in turn alienates him from the lower classes.

While Gatewood makes many worthy observations of Confederacy and deserves to be read, her text is, like Ignatius, ambiguous. For example, she quotes Daigrepont's poorly thought-out article (New Orleans Review, 1982) extensively and apparently favorably (e.g. 46); yet, she often pushes beyond his conclusions and then (correctly) refutes them (e.g. 48). Tison Pugh (Studies in Medievalism, 2006) covers some of the same territory (gender ambiguity and transgression), but Gatewood correctly puts these themes in the context of Carnival. She claims that Ignatius even transgresses the role of the transgressor by seeing the bourgeois as vulgar. She compares Ignatius to New Orleans itself (31). She discusses Ignatius's relationship to fate, but she rejects Clark's theory (Essays in Literature, 1987) that the novel points to God behind the seeming chaos of fortune (38). Basically, well done, though I personally agree with Clark rather than Gatewood.

Giddings, Greg. The Picaresque Element in A Confederacy of Dunces. Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX, 1993.

Originally reviewed in 2011

This MA Thesis is a solid study of Confederacy. Although other critics have described Ignatius as a picaro (Elizabeth Bell, Byrne as interviewed by Palumbo, Patteson and Sauret), none of those critics carefully investigated Giddings' thesis.

Giddings uses Stuart Miller's 1967 study, The Picaresque Novel as his standard. He systematically analyses Confederacy using the set of elements that Miller found in the seminal picaresque novels of the 14th through 16th centuries.

These elements include: a) an episodic plot driven by accidents, b) a lack of order and a disjointed, first person narrative, c) a motif of underworld imagery, and d) the picaro as a lonely victim of misfortune, forced to disguise, dissemble, and join an immoral world he despises to keep from starving.

Giddings shows that while Confederacy shares many elements with those earlier novels, it ultimately cannot be called a picaresque novel according to Miller's definition. Confederacy's plot appears episodic but ends in comic resolution. Ignatius is not about to starve, and he uses his ornate language to belittle, not flatter.

Giddings concludes that Confederacy is "a comedic novel with a picaro for its protagonist" (85). Personally, I would modify this statement to say a mock picaro. This thesis is currently only held by one library worldwide, and it is not in UMI's Dissertation Abstracts system, so it would be difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, it is a unique contribution to Toole studies.

Lambert, M. Michele Macgregor.Masquerading and the Comic Grotesque in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toledo, 1999.

Originally reviewed in 2010: Two different theses in one: one good, one okay

This dissertation is cleanly divided into two parts, the first exploring Confederacy's womb theme (pages 1-17), and the second exploring Toole's use of New Orleans carnival in the novel. The first part is the more successful: Lambert shows not only the obvious wombs explicitly discussed in the novel, but less obvious ones, such as the office at Levy Pants and the mental hospital.

The second part is, IMHO, misguided and has a false thesis. Lambert argues that Ignatius is the only character in the novel "who exhibits empathy for anyone else" and that he is alienated by the others (19). A careful reading of the text indicates the opposite: he is one of the most selfish characters in the novel and he alienates others.

Lambert uses Bakhtin for her theory of Carnival. She correctly points out details of masking throughout the book (Mrs. Levy putting a wig over her dyed hair, Myrna's fake glasses, etc.), but her conclusion is flawed. She also fails to mention all of the Carnival references, such as the mock tableau in the final pages. She does note that Ignatius becomes a scapegoat for the other characters. Good but not great. Karen Williams's Images of Uneasy Hybrids is better.

Mitchell, Reid. All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. Harvard UP, 1995.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Well-written study New Orleans Carnival

This text is an enjoyable read and also seems to encompass well the current scholarly understandings of New Orleans Carnival. It's basic thesis is that Carnival can mean many things because it is not clearly defined. Social groups contest its meaning competitively. It is sometimes seen as a ritual of social harmony, sometimes as a satirical rejection of and rebellion against the current social order, sometimes as a manifestation or reaffirmation of social oppression such as racism and class distinctions, sometimes as a vehicle for commercial activity, and sometimes as a wild expression of individual liberation against social expectations and all social order. In the end, it is sometimes all of those things.

A crucial idea to the book is that social power is measured by the ability of a social group to claim a shared public space at a particular time. The fact that during the late 19th century a secret and self-selected group called the Krewe of Comus had exerted its privilege to hold a parade on Mardi Gras evening on the main commercial street in New Orleans signals that the group had a great deal of what one might call social capital. The fact that during post-bellum Reconstruction the group used that space to critique and delegitimize the federally imposed governments of Louisiana and New Orleans indicates an exercise of that social capital to legitimize the violent overthrow of the government.

One point of the book is to focus specifically on the Carnival of New Orleans without trying to use it as an example of a generalized category of all carnival celebrations. Other books, such as Kinser's Carnival, American Style, start with a theory of carnival and then try to fit New Orleans carnival into it. Mitchell argues: "In fact, the notion that all scholarship must conform to a given model is in itself anticarnivalesque" (9). Mitchell is quick to point to aspects of New Orleans carnival that do not fit with given theories of carnival. One of his major points is that New Orleans, even from its beginning, was a plural society with multiple groups vying for social power.

The book is structured so that each chapter focuses on an episode of two groups contesting the definition of Carnival or the efforts of a particular group to make a public assertion during Carnival. These include: French versus Anglo-American control in the early 19th century, the early African assertion of the Congo-dance, native born versus immigrant groups in the mid-19th century, the terrorist White League against Reconstruction, reconciliation with the North after the start of segregation, high society inventing a class-based tradition a la Eric Hobsbawm at the end of the 19th century, black reassertion with the Mardi Gras Indians, the rise of female krewes, transgender and gay activities, jazz versus traditional music, the Zulu versus respectable black society, and the recent fight to order the racial integration of krewes. One important detail: the story told in Tallant's Mardi Gras about the Russian Grand Duke being humiliated in 1872 by the passing marching bands is demonstrably false, though it makes a great story.

The book ends with the conclusion that Carnival traditions are not timeless, but frequently change. Racial tensions are a carnival tradition. Worries about violence are also a carnival tradition.

Williams, Karen Luanne. Images of Uneasy Hybrids: Carnival and New Orleans. Diss. Emory University, 1992.

This dissertation is a lengthy study of the relation of Carnival to New Orleans. The fourth chapter explores the use of Carnival in other New Orleans novels, and the entire fifth chapter is devoted to detailing the use of Carnival in Confederacy. Williams relies on, first, Bakhtin's theory of Carnival, which he had articulated in works on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais first translated into English in the mid-1960s and, second, Umberto Eco's critique of Bakhtin from the 1980s. Her main thesis is that the meaning of Carnival is ambiguous, and that it is neither as liberating as Bakhtin claimed nor as limiting as Eco claimed. She discusses abusive language and conflict, the obsession with food, and the wedding of the sacred with the profane—of the ideal with the grotesque. While this is the most thorough study of Confederacy's use of Carnival prior to Potrc's, it neglects to mention those references to New Orleans' Carnival in Confederacy that do not fit into Bakhtin's theory, such as the mock tableau at the end of the book. She effectively uses Carnival theory to criticize the conclusions put forth by McNeil and Nelson about the meaning of the novel. To Williams, Carnival gives Confederacy a more positive, celebratory meaning. Well done.

Woodland, James R. "In that City Foreign and Paradoxical": The Idea of New Orleans in the Southern Literary Imagination (Louisiana). Diss., U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987.

A Ph.D. dissertation of over 300 pages, this paper investigates many literary works. Early chapters discuss George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Spencer, and Tennessee Williams. Chapter Seven (302) discusses and compares Confederacy with Percy's Moviegoer and Lancelot. Woodland cites Regan’s article comparing Moviegoer to Confederacy. Both Binx and Ignatius are in the culture but not of it (308, 325). Woodland sees Ignatius Reilly as an native who is nevertheless an observant outsider like the outsider George Washington Cable's Frowenfeld (325). Woodland also briefly compares Confederacy to Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (324, 326). He points out that in both, ethnic diversity is comforting rather than exotic, which ties in nicely to Lowe's study of Confederacy's relationship to ethnic melee comedy. He compares Ignatius's outrage about the degeneracy of the French Quarter as being like Lance's (327). In 1968, Percy wrote that the virtue of New Orleans was the talent for everyday life. Ignatius also finds in New Orleans a source of creature comforts, the hope of small things (328). Okay, but not especially insightful as an interpretation of Confederacy.

Cooper, Helen. The Canterbury Tales. Oxford UP, 1989.

Originally reviewed in 2008

A one volume overview of the Canterbury Tales. You can get the second edition, published in 1996, but the text of the second edition is substantially the same as the first edition, the only difference being the updating of the bibliography. The first edition from 1989 is more widely held in libraries.

There seems to be a wide spectrum of perspectives on Chaucer, with a broad shift in prevailing opinion through the course of the 20th century. Kittredge in the early 20th century, Chaucer and his Poetry (Harvard, 1915), lead the view that Chaucer was a representative of a proto-naturalism, celebrating worldly human nature in a way reminiscent of early 20th century modern novels and maturing beyond stiff medieval convention.

Charles Muscatine in the 1950's, Chaucer and the French Tradition (California, 1957), was part of a tradition that rejected that view, and showed that he interwove courtly convention with bourgeois naturalism for various effects throughout his career. Chaucer was not a crypto-modern and wrote from a conventionally religious medieval aesthetic framework.

In 1976, Alfred David struck back with The Strumpet Muse, arguing that Chaucer's works celebrate the carnal even if Chaucer consciously was not intending to portray such celebration. Therefore, David has a bit of a postmodern perspective that the text should be interpreted separately from the intentions of the author.

Derek Pearsall, Canterbury Tales (Allen and Unwin, 1985), seems to represent a backlash against postmodern interpretations of the text that deviate from the author's apparent intentions and reject a unity of the viewpoint of Chaucer's works.

Helen Cooper tries to straddle the debate. She accepts most of the more conservative perspective that Chaucer knew what he was doing and did what he intended, but she also accepts the Bakhtinian interpretation that there is a theme of carnivalesque rejection of the official viewpoint within the Canterbury Tales.

This book is considered by some scholars to be the most comprehensive scholarly review of the late 20th century understanding of the Canterbury Tales. Organized by tale and by character in the general prologue, it can be readily used as a reference book by a student who only wants to study one tale or pilgrim.

David, Alfred. The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry. Indiana UP, 1976.

Originally reviewed in 2012.

A volume on the meaning of Chaucer's works that still has resonance today (2008).

There seems to be a wide spectrum of perspectives on Chaucer, with a broad shift in prevailing opinion through the course of the 20th century. Kittredge in the early 20th century lead the view that Chaucer was a representative of a proto-naturalism, celebrating worldly human nature in a way reminiscent of early 20th century modern novels and maturing beyond stiff medieval convention. Muscatine in the 1950's was part of a tradition that rejected that view, and showed that Chaucer interwove courtly convention with bourgeois naturalism for various effects throughout his career.

In this volume from 1976, Alfred David struck back, arguing that Chaucer's works celebrate the carnal, even if Chaucer consciously was not intending to portray such celebration. Therefore, David has a bit of a postmodern perspective that the text should be interpreted separately from the intentions of the author. He sees the perspective that one should embrace this world as superior and more mature than the rejection of this world for a divine transcendence. He acknowledges that Chaucer explicitly sides with the transcendent perspective, but then David argues that Chaucer was too good a poet to allow his text to be limited by the conventions and beliefs of his day.

The title comes from Boethius. Boethius in the Consolation of Philosophy had the personification of Philosophy chase the literary muses away from the prisoner, because they encourage him to dwell on this world rather than on the eternal, platonically ideal and unchanging higher plane of reality. David, very much in the Zeitgeist of the 1960s, rejects that higher plane as an illusion, and he sees the strumpet muse as someone to embrace. While Chaucer seems to reject the strumpet muse of literature in his respect for Boethius and his criticism of worldly clerics, the fact that he writes literature and that his literature has these earthly and earthy characters come alive indicates to David that the text itself argues in favor of the worldly and transient over the mythical ideal realm.

This book is an early exposition connecting the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to Chaucer's work. Bakhtin argued that there is an unofficial culture paralleling the official culture in the medieval era and even later. The unofficial culture celebrates life, and it uses the grotesque, the carnivalesque and satire to put forward its challenge to the official culture of denial. David argues that Chaucer's work officially supports the culture of the church but allows that culture to be challenged by the Miller and the Wife of Bath, who operate in a grotesque mode. One could slap the easy label "secular humanism" on David's line of argument.

Gottschall, Jonathan and David Sloan Wilson (eds). The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Northwestern University Press, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Collection Essays on Evolutionary Literary Criticism

This volume contains a set of scholarly essays on literary criticism from an evolutionary psychology (EP) perspective. It is difficult to give an edited collection a single grade, as the essays are of varying quality. Nevertheless, I have not run across an essay that I hated, and most of the essays I have read are solid, though not all excellent, so a four star is reasonable. I will list the essays below with my opinion of their content and quality.

Forwards: I was unimpressed by the forward by E. O. Wilson. I did enjoy the second forward by Frederick Crews. Crews starts by pointing out that he had been a sharp critic of the earlier attempts to write evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). He explains why this collection is an improvement. One nice detail of Crews' essay is that he critiques and analyzes what consilience means and how it is fundamentally limited.

Ian McEwan's article is a general argument in favor of ELC, and it is an okay read. It is reprinted here from elsewhere. Good but not eye-opening. He discusses Darwin's own writings on man and E.O. Wilson's speculations on what a termite philosopher might say. McEwan lists the many thinkers and writers who have insisted that on a given day, human nature changed. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Burckhardt, etc. implicitly argue that human nature is an historical product. An advocate of ELC by contrast would argue that human nature has a more durable aspect which is shaped by biology. McEwan critiques theories of an entirely malleable human nature, such as John Watson's Behaviorism and Margaret Mead's anthropology.

The next essay is by D. S. Wilson himself, and it is a good read. It is not on ELC per se. It argues that a less extreme version of social constructivism is good so long as it is compatible with evolution. Wilson's version of evolution is different from that of many other evolutionary theorists, so this thesis is not universally accepted. Wilson has argued that human beings experience both individual selection and group selection. Group selection is driven by non-genetic processes of cultural evolution. He argues that narrative has a strong effect on human behavior, and that, for human groups, "adaptation to current environments proceeds in part through the creation and selection of alternative narratives" (21). Human nature is flexible to culture, but it is not completely flexible. This essay is not about applying biological evolution in your literary criticism, but rather showing how narrative is a mechanism for human cultural evolution.

The essay by Dylan Evans is fun, even though it is only tangentially related to ELC. Evans became interested in Lacan's ideas when he was in Argentina. There, psychoanalysts actually use Lacan's teachings as the basis for clinical therapy. Evans spent years digging down to where he could fully understand and defend Lacan's theories. As part of that effort, he wrote The Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

When Evans finally mastered Lacan, he discovered that Lacan's theories are in fact bogus. To quote Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. One can imagine the difficulty this caused in his life. After abandoning Lacan, he embraced EP as a paradigm with a foundation in real, observable phenomena. This essay is useful to literary critics because in the US and Britain, Lacan's ideas are a fashionable framework for interpreting literature. The moral: don't base your literary interpretation on a view of human nature that is fundamentally wrong, it can only lead you astray.

I actually take issue with Evans' conclusion to a small extent. I would argue that if an author believed in a model of human nature and structured the text to be consistent with that mistaken view, then it is useful to analyze the text within that framework even if it is false to human nature. For example, James Joyce was a follower of Freud, so it is useful to understand Freud when reading Joyce's texts, even though Freud has been largely debunked in the field of psychology. (But one should be aware of that fact also.) Or to take an older example, Renaissance art accepted astrological influences as true. You need to know the astrology to interpret the work, even though astrology itself is also bogus. I feel that the primary meaning of the text flows from the intentions of the author. A critic should start by understanding what the work meant to the author, even if the critic then eventually goes on to study what it might also mean to the broader community, etc.

Daniel Nettle's essay is a good read. It studies drama from the ELC point of view. He starts with general reasoning about evolution and literature, and his conclusions are similar to Sugiyama's (below). Nettles defines drama, and then tries to derive a theory of drama from evolutionary premises. He then compares his theory to other drama theories throughout history. Finally, he offers a typology of drama. His two main motivations in drama are status-striving and mate-courting. If the motive is status and the outcome is positive, then the story is heroic. If status and negative, then tragic. If mating and positive, then it is a romantic comedy. If mating and negative, then the play is a love tragedy, such as Romeo and Juliet. He applies his ideas to Shakespeare's Hamlet in detail and to other plays in passing. Like Crews, he argues that each text tries to push the boundaries of its category, so any one play might not fit neatly into the typology.

Joseph Carroll's essay is not a good read, but it may turn out to be an important contribution to theory. Carroll was one of the few ELC writers whose earlier work is cited by other contributors, so I was eager to read the Carroll piece in this collection. Carroll is a bit stiff and condescending to those who disagree with him. He has a detailed theoretical framework that he insists is necessary to ELC, so some thinkers are not on board for his full programme. He even disapproves of much of EP, arguing that it will not be a paradigm of psychology until it "includes an understanding of how the specifically human pattern of life-history ... responds with flexible but integrated strategies to the wide range of physical and cultural conditions ..." (77).

The basis of his psychology is a concept called a behavior system. He lists five analytical concepts that are necessary to ELC, including that human nature is "a structured hierarchy of motives" and that "point of view is the locus of meaning" of a narrative. He goes on to chart the hierarchy of motives that he feels make EP a full-fledged theory of psychology. He ends the essay with an analysis of Austen's Pride and Prejudice, where he explains how both the hierarchy of motives and the centrality of point of view operate in practice. Frankly, I don't think his theory works well for genre other than novels and short stories. In this volume, I prefer Sugiyama's reverse engineering of narrative (below).

The aspect of this essay that I like is Carroll's view of intentionality. He argues that the point of literary criticism is to find out what a text's meaning is (94), and that its meaning flows primarily from the intentions of the author (90). (One might suppose that that perspective was obvious, but many literary theorists deny it.) He also acknowledges the point of view of the story's characters and the story's audience. This last POV allows a bit of reception theory and new historicism. I do feel that the critic should analyze a text to try to learn the intentions of the author, though I admit that such a meaning is not the entire reason for studying a text.

One aspect of evolution that justifiably scares political liberals and leftists is the idea that because there is a biological survival of the fitted, some individuals will be better at surviving than others, and that one can then claim that some humans are superior to others (at least in that sense). This focus on the individual can lead to discrimination by some individuals or groups against others, or to a cold lassiz-faire instead of a social contract.

Carroll does not shy away from this explosive issue. He argues both that general intelligence is important and that individual differences matter (81). He criticizes EP for avoiding these issues and praises the older sociobiology for including them. For example, general intelligence is then one of the features in a mate that Austen's characters are looking for, and the conflict of the courtship is for the smart ones to avoid the dumb ones. By focusing on these issues, though, Carroll may be missing D.S. Wilson's point that storytelling is part of group selection and cultural evolution. A text may have a meaning that is relevant to the broader cultural politics of the society without being part of the author's conscious intentions.

Nordlund's essay on romantic love is a bit thin. If the reader is familiar with differential mating strategies between men and women popularized by David Buss (men being less choosy about opportunistic mating than women, for example), then the essay does not add much. Nordlund discusses and argues against theories that romantic love is entirely socially constructed and unique to Western culture. His best contribution is the analogy of eating (109). Different societies eat different foods, at different times, and in different ways, but no one doubts that everyone experiences hunger and has to eat. Likewise, different cultures have different manifestations of romantic love, but no one should doubt that everyone has the capacity to feel the same basic sexual attraction and engage in courtship rituals.

Nordlund argues that two instincts (Bowlby's emotional attachment theory and the general drive for sex) are functionally independent but interconnected. He then applies his theory to Shakespeare's "problem plays," "Troilus and Cressida" and "All's Well that Ends Well." Conflicting mating strategies explain the behavior of the women in the plays better than theories that argue that their actions represent Shakespeare's attempts to subvert the dominance structures of patriarchal societies. His goal in this analysis is to show how biology, culture, conventions of literary genre, and Shakespeare's own artistic goals clash and interrelate. Okay, but fairly predictable.

The essay by Robin Fox on male bonding is a quick read but good because not predictable. It argues that many epics feature a heroic male bonding that competes with and overshadows heterosexual male-female mate bonding. Light on theory. Plenty of examples. Fox points out that in chimp social groups, the males are strongly connected as a band of brothers and the mating relationship is weak. The epic is a genre for male heroics, so it often features the male bond, such as Achilles and Patroclus. Fox argues from an evolutionary point of view, male bonding in hunting and war is just as critical to the survival of the human group as bonding with one's mate, and in that sense Fox's conclusions are not obvious from the EP literature.

Part 2 of the collection has two essays on trying to explain why art exists from an evolutionary viewpoint.

The essay by Brian Boyd is well thought out, so a good read though a bit heavy. Boyd tries to offer theories of art in general, including narrative but also music, performance, and visual art. He defines art as "an attempt to engage attention by transforming objects and/or actions in order to appeal to species-wide cognitive preferences" (148). He then reviews both traditional theories of art (Aristotle, Kant, etc.) and evolutionary theories (Pinker, Miller, Dissanayake, Cosimedes). His critiques of previous evolutionary theories is detailed and well thought out. Not surprising, given his definition of art, his own theory is that "the ability to share and shape the attention of others ... led to the development of art" (152).

The essay by Sugiyama is a good read. It argues that the different arts are distinct. Her process is to reverse-engineer narrative to break it down into essential components and then investigate how those components would have offered an evolutionary selection advantage. The reasoning is tight and the logic moves quickly. This essay presages and is cited by Gottschall's more recent book, The Storytelling Animal.

Part 3 has essays on Darwinian theory and scientific methods.

The essay by Gottschall himself is a good read. It walks the reader through the use of statistical analysis to test feminist hypotheses of gender in folklore and their underlying theory. He tested the prevalence of these features in folktales: female passivity, a focus on female attractiveness, a marriage motive for women, and a disproportion of female antagonists over age 40. It shows that feminists that claim that European folklore was atypically oppressive of women are wrong. The same pattern is seen in folklore from all continents and from both hunter-gatherers and agrarian societies. Noteworthy is the finding that the European subsample "actually contained the highest proportion of active female protagonists in the study" (213). So western civilization, which gave rise to feminism, has had a long tradition of strong women. As for aged antagonists, he found that there is a general discrimination against elderly characters regardless of their sex.

Gottschall even controlled for female versus male editors of tales, and he controlled for the male versus female workers who scored the results. Gottschall argues that these results offer evidence against the hard social constructivist principle that gender arrangements in a human society are arbitrary. He also argues against the post-modern skepticism that one can attain reliable knowledge at all, and he argues that statistical analysis yields more permanent conclusions.

The essay by Kruger, Fisher and Jobling is okay, but is largely a testing within literature of psychological types pioneered by Draper and Belsky. Two types of male protagonists in British Romantic era novels, the proper (emotionally sensitive) hero and the dark hero, fit well with the dad versus cad mating strategy types found by Draper and company. The essay is primarily the report of a psychology study, testing American college women and their reactions to character descriptions from these novels. The data support the hypothesis that the proper versus dark heroes match the cad versus dad strategies, and that for the test subjects, the shorter the imagined relationship, the more likely the cad type would be appealing. The researchers also found that that those subjects who tested in the Bartholomew attachment test as "fearfully attached" were most likely to show a preference for the dark hero/cad strategy. These authors agree with Carroll that life-history analysis is important to EP and ELC.

The essay by Salmon is a good read. It explores erotica, testing feminist theories of erotica against evolutionary theories. Male pornography is heavy on objectified visual stimuli and features minimal plot and a maximum of sexual encounters with strangers. By contrast, the romance novel, with a predominantly female readership, focuses on plot and usually ends with the start of a permanent emotional bond. If the romance is explicit, the sex is a means toward the emotional bond. The male hero is not submissive, but very masculine, physically and socially competent, like Russell Crowe's character in the movie Gladiator.

Feminists often see male porn as oppressive to women and often see romances as women accepting their socially constructed submissiveness. Salmon points to two genre to debunk these claims: gay male porn and slash fiction. Gay porn has same features as heterosexual porn, except all the actors are enjoying themselves. Slash fiction is written by women for women, but features male homosexual relationships. An example of the slash is Kirk/Spock. Slash fiction shares most features of the female romance novel, heavy on emotional struggle and commitment. These two demonstrate that the gender-specific features are biologically based, not cultural.

The afterword by Dutton is unimpressive.

Olson, Paul A. The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society. Princeton UP, 1986.

Originally reviewed in 2008

Olson, like Pearsall, seems to represent a backlash against postmodern interpretations of the text like Alfred David's that deviate from the author's apparent intentions and reject a unity of the viewpoint of Chaucer's works. Olson states in his opening that he had originally done much of his research in the 1950s and 1960s, but that due to professional obligations, he had not compiled them into a book until 1986, so it should not surprise the reader that his viewpoint is more in keeping with Muscatine, as the thinking was actually done at the time of Muscatine's work.

While Chaucer uses irony to criticize a wide variety of members of his society, Olson argues that Chaucer was most critical of the "Sect of the Wife of Bath" as he calls it. This sect, as it were, represents an epicurean celebration of pleasure in this world. It is identified with the Wife of Bath because in the prologue to her tale, she gives a theological and philosophical defense of that worldview. Olson examines the various theological arguments extant during Chaucer's time. Chaucer, in his view, was commenting on the ideas of Wycliff. "The Knight's Tale" is part of Chaucer's critique of the church's position on how a king should be advised. The church argued that the king should be advised by wise monks as opposed to a council of knights and barons.

Olson argues that the Miller, the Reeve and others demonstrate the pathologies that can occur when the aristocracy abandons their traditional function of regulating the social order. During Chaucer's lifetime, the English nobles were often away in France fighting the Hundred Year's War. Olson argues that Chaucer was part of a segment in the society that wanted peace with France. Donald Howard's landmark biography of Chaucer does not entirely bear out this view of Chaucer's outlook.

Whether or not one fully accepts Olson's ideas, they are useful in more fully learning the spectrum of interpretation about the meaning of Chaucer's works.

Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1985.

Originally reviewed in 2008

A one volume overview of the Canterbury Tales. It reviews the literature current as of 1985. It is considered an excellent study even as of the year 2005.

There seems to be a wide spectrum of perspectives on Chaucer, with a broad shift in prevailing opinion through the course of the 20th century. See the Cooper review for a summary.

Pearsall's book is part of what I interpret to be a backlash against David and the Summer of Love interpretation of the Canterbury Tales. He explicitly criticizes David and goes on to criticize all critics who attempt to read their ideological agenda into Chaucer. He declines interpretations that propose that a tale should be read as an ironic treatment of a point of view.

That having been said, this volume gives a close reading of the tales and is recommended. It is organized by genre of tale rather than by individual tales, so it is not conducive to being used as a reference book.

Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In which four Russians give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. New York : Random House, 2021.

Originally reviewed in 2024

This book purports to be a master class given by four Russians on "writing, reading, and life." One thing that George Saunders does in the book is explain how he himself goes about writing a short story. He also offers close analyses of seven Russian short stories from the late 19th century, a time which was a high point of Russian liberal culture. In the process, he presents his own vision for the value of literature in general. He uses as a pretended conceit that the Russians are teaching the class, which they are not. Although Saunders strenuously rejects the idea that he is writing a "how to" manual for writers, the overarching theme of the book is a "how to," or rather, "this is how I did it, here are the principles that I think are important, and you can figure out your own way."

Saunders agrees with George Eliot, Jamil Zaki, and others that the purpose of literature is to expand our empathy to all people. These 19th century Russian short stories are fairly domestic, but he argues that they are part of a resistance literature which defends the (liberal) ideal that everyone is worthy of attention. He states that readers are a vast underground network for good in the world. Reading makes them more expansive, generous people.

Ironically, Saunders almost immediately contradicts his own vision just stated that literature makes us better people. He notes that the Nazis were skilled at using pageantry to promote their values, and he admits that art can have a dangerous propaganda value. I agree with his latter position that art can be dangerous, but I would frame it to say that literature plays a role in establishing cultural norms. It gets you to connect to a culture through your emotions. For example, Dante's Divine Comedy helped define what it was to be an Italian in the medieval era.

Saunders' own vision—that literature is a force of good in the world and makes us better people—is itself a cultural norm. His writings promote a number of cultural norms. To take one aspect of his writing as an example, the sexual norms in his fiction would not be welcome in more restrictive societies. I would not call his stories especially raunchy, but his books would not be shelved in the Amish fiction section. (I grew up in an area that was heavily Amish and Mennonite. I have been told, but might have the details wrong, that the public library there recently had a specific aisle for Amish fiction. Amish and Mennonite women were forbidden by their communities from checking out fiction that was not from that aisle.)

Saunders is in the delicate position of being a white male in an academic culture that, on average, skews to the left on political and social issues—a culture that sometimes casts a jaundiced eye on white males. He is holding up the work of these dead white males as Great Literature at a time when many adherents of Critical Theory argue that that is wrong. As I interpret it, critical theory argues that we should have a post-colonial and post-defined-sexuality and post-science (antiphysis) and post-religious attitude toward viewing the world in general and literature in particular. Praising the Great Writers is not part of the programme.

Saunders sees literature as asking big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What are we supposed to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth anyway? Why read literature? Saunders argues that the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world. It can deceive us, but it can be trained to accuracy.

This is a vision of literature as universalistic. On the one hand, some theologians might argue that these questions should be left to religion. On the other hand, some critical theorists see this sort of universal position as propping up a privileged group. They ask: who is being held up as the universal man? Saunders gives a nod to critical theory by arguing that Chekhov structured his stories, such as "Gooseberries," so that pronouncements and positions are destabilized. "Destabilized" is a good term in critical theory; it is almost as good as terms such as defamiliarize or de-reify. By presenting his ideas as "just my way of doing it," and focusing on techniques for writing rather than criteria for what counts as Great Literature, Saunders dodges the thrust of critical theory.

In one instance, though, Saunders makes a rather strange and questionable argument that sexism and discrimination based on social class can be translated into bad technique. According to this perspective, if Tolstoy hadn't been so blindly privileged in his attitudes towards the peasants, his stories would have been better. Saunders can then say, hey, it's not all about race, class, and gender; it can be reduced to an argument about good technique and bad technique. You can still enjoy the dead white males who had good technique and therefore had good universalistic values.

By focusing on the Russian writers of the 19th century, Saunders may be setting up a lesson about the excesses of revolutionary culture. Today's critical theory is related to Marxism, and, as Saunders points out, what destroyed all those sensitive readers of the Russian Renaissance were the Bolsheviks—Marxists who took them out and shot them. Saunders doesn't name current critical theorists, but one might infer that this aside is a cautionary tale.

On the surface, Saunders focuses on techniques, such as "maintain specificity," "always be escalating," etc., but he sneaks in praise for the sensitivity and understanding of these writers he showcases. Chekhov was wise about loneliness. Gogol was wise about the role of language in constructing our inner world. This is a book that praises the wisdom and universalist ideals of the Great Masters, even if it slips those assessments in under the guise of a technical discussion.

In his own writing process, Saunders starts with any idea, then subjects his current draft to intensive revision. To him, this technique allows his unconscious sense of the story to come out through a thousand micro-decisions. He just follows the inner voice and lets it take him where it wants to go. He does not like the idea of mapping out a plot; rather, a story creates questions which need to be resolved. When he began as a writer, he wanted to write in a spare, realist style like Hemingway, but he discovered that his most effective writing was in a comic, absurdist style. His advice: find your most effective style, even if it is not what you hoped it would be.

Saunders argues that you need to get people to want to read your work. It has to be interesting enough sentence by sentence for them to keeping reading and satisfying enough in the end for them to start the next story. This vision suggests that the art should follow the reader rather than the reader follow the art, and it seems to encourage the would-be writer to chase after the tastes of the broadest audiences, whether they were the readers of pulp fiction a century ago or the followers of click-bait today.

Of course, readers who follow cultural leaders are more inclined to read what those leaders promote, and in that way, the art can lead the reader. Saunders leads us to these wise Russians. The editors at The New Yorker led their readers to Saunders. As for myself, I would never have read The Friends of Eddie Coyle by Higgins if it had not been suggested by someone whose opinions I respect.

At the end of the book, Saunders humorously disavows that his advice is authoritative. What he seems to be saying is: "This is how I do it, ... just sayin'. ... But I am successful and well-respected, and I learned at the hands of other successful and respected writers such as Tobias Wolff. Just sayin'." He insists that his entire book be bracketed by the words, "According to George." In this way, he can influence the reading public and preserve traditional aesthetic values without appearing to impose them and without being skewered by those who reject the canon.

I like the book. That having been said, I will destabilize my judgment by pointing out that Saunders needed an editor to cut the length. He doesn't give one metaphor for the writing process, he gives dozens. If I had been reading instead of listening to the e-audiobook version, I might have been more frustrated by the repetition ad nauseum. Take your own advice, man: always be escalating!

Shapiro, James. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Originally reviewed in 2012: Shakespeare doubters debunked and deconstructed

This is a study of the history of people who doubt that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and it is both fun and educational. Shapiro samples the long portrait gallery of Shakespeare doubters, including Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Sigmund Freud, and others. But he uses that history (and his own command of the evidence that Shakespeare really did write his plays) to make a point about the nature of creativity in general and Shakespeare's genius in particular.

One of the reasons that Shapiro was motivated to write this book was that when he was giving lectures about his book "1599," college students kept asking him about whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays. Apparently, a recent young-adult novel takes as fact that Shakespeare did not write the plays, so many college students today—having read that novel as high schoolers—are Shakespeare doubters. Also, the Internet has made conspiracy theories of all types more public and available.

Shapiro makes the point that there have been so many Shakespeare doubters over the years, especially in the late 19th and early 20th century, that it would take an encyclopedia to detail them all. So instead, he only gives a small sample of them. His philosophy: just the fun stuff. He covers the very earliest doubters, and then the most famous or colorful.

For each of the Shakespeare doubters discussed, Shapiro shows that the doubts helped reinforce preconceived biases. In the mid-19th century, Romantics believed that a creative genius could not also be a competent businessman. One was either an artist or a bourgeois philistine. The earliest hard evidence that scholars could find about Shakespeare related to his successful business activities. Therefore, Shakespeare could not have written the plays.

Many people believe that in order to write creatively, one needs to have a great deal of experience with the lifestyle of the fiction. Because the plays are convincing narratives of the royal court and the views of aristocrats, a commoner could not have written them. Therefore, Shakespeare could not have written the plays. For Freud, Hamlet was the original case that helped him develop his Oedipus Complex (which was originally named the Hamlet Complex). When evidence came forward that Shakespeare had written Hamlet before his father died, Freud's theory about the play was in trouble. So Shakespeare could not have written the plays. Others find it impossible that a bumpkin from Warwickshire could have been one of the greatest wordsmiths of the English language. Therefore, Shakespeare could not have written the plays.

Finally, Shapiro rolls out the rich evidence he had uncovered while writing "1599" that Shakespeare did indeed write the plays. If you have already read that earlier book, this chapter is a condensed repeat.

Shapiro's larger point is that a good creative writer really can write about things that he or she has not directly experienced. To think otherwise is to have a defective view of the powers of human creativity. Also, Shakespeare was not a genius who got things right the first time. His genius was a genius of intensive rewriting. He worked hard for the money, thank you very much.

Note: Shapiro has a bad habit of saving the best parts of his book for last. In this book, he does not lay out the best evidence for Shakespeare until the end of the text, so it is possible for someone to read two-thirds of the book and still be convinced that Shakespeare did not write his plays.

Shapiro, James. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599. New York : HarperCollins, 2005.

Originally reviewed in 2016: Shakespeare scholarship with evidence

This study of Shakespeare and his times is important, because it uses documented evidence, rather than speculation. Shapiro uses diaries, sermons, traveler's accounts, and official records to show how Shakespeare's plays relate to his time. Shapiro writes: "Over time, I had a chance to read almost all of the books written in 1599 that Shakespeare might have owned or borrowed or come upon in London's bookstalls. ... While I also read unpublished materials, I tried to focus on what Shakespeare's contemporaries could have put their hands on."

Shapiro also uses detailed scholarship on the actors at the Globe and the world of the Elizabethan stage. Myriad other Shakespeare scholars have speculated about what the bard must have thought or felt or believed by projecting onto him their own interpretations of his works. Shapiro minimizes that speculation by leaving no stone of possible influence or connection unturned.

Shapiro comes to this enormous amount of scholarship with the goal of showing that Coleridge was wrong when he said that Shakespeare wrote as though he was from another planet. To Shapiro, a genius does not appear godlike and divorced from his surroundings. Shapiro shows that Shakespeare was an obsessive reviser of his texts. He argues that the playwright of 1599 was not "Shakespeare in Love" but "Shakespeare at work."

Shapiro builds on the work done by earlier historians, who tried to ascertain the order in which the plays were written. He focuses on the plays that were either performed or were being drafted during 1599. During that year, "Henry V" was finished and performed, "Julius Caesar" was written and performed, and "As You Like It" was written. Shakespeare also wrote his first draft of "Hamlet" that Fall.

The book begins with the battle between Will Shakespeare and Will Kemp, who was the most popular actor in the company. Kemp was a clown who ad-libbed, horsed around, and danced bawdy jigs after the conclusion of the play in the common theatre. Before 1599, Kemp had played the roles of Falstaff, Bottom, and Dogberry. In 1599, Kemp was forced out of the company. In Hamlet's instructions to the players, he rails against clowns who ad-lib and jig. After the departure of Kemp, Shakespeare could write serious tragedy.

Much of the book is spent recounting the history of the English attempt to subdue the Irish in 1599. The Earl of Essex was the model of the chivalric knight. He led the English and failed. He threatened to try to overthrow Elizabeth. His failure showed chivalry was dead. The political unrest informed "Julius Caesar." "Hamlet" was written with a sense of the end of heroic action. Many lesser noblemen who went with Essex to Ireland slipped back to England disillusioned and were loose in London to go to the theatre.

The book also deals with Shakespeare's attempts to get a family coat of arms and to recover inherited lands back. This evidence shows Shakespeare cared about the old aristocratic orders, even as he saw them receding. "As You Like It" is set in a fictional forest of Arden, and Shakespeare's lost land was in the real Warwick Forest of Arden. "As You Like It" provides critical distance to the pastoral tradition. Shakespeare knew and wrote about the poverty and hunger in the deforested and enclosed England of 1599.

Shapiro shows through comparison of the different versions of Hamlet how Shakespeare originally envisaged the play and how he revised it to fix the problems with the plot. Again, this is the genius as workhorse and reviser, not the genius struck by idle inspiration. Much confusion in interpretation stems from a misunderstanding of the textual history of the play. The concept of the personal essay from Montaigne was new to late 16th century England, and Hamlet's soliloquies explore this new mode of interior soul-searching.

Shakespeare took the measure of his times. He was of his age, not for all ages equally.

Note: Some members of my book club did not care for the book because of its excessive digression into minutiae. I have to agree that the best material in the book is towards the end, where Hamlet is discussed. So if one does not hang in there until the end, one might not like the book. Shapiro had the same problem with "Contested Will." He saved most of the evidence for Shakespeare's authorship until the last chapter, so one could read most of the book and still think that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare. Saving the best for last works when the reader finishes, but newspaper editors know that you should lead with choice material in case the reader stops after a paragraph.

Strohm, Paul. Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury. Viking, 2014.

Originally reviewed in 2015

This book is a mere 250 pages, is written in clear prose, and provides a current (2014) scholarly perspective on the life of Geoffrey Chaucer. It has changed my own understanding of Chaucer's relationship to his social context. References to scholarly work are tucked discreetly in the endnotes. Some books I have to force myself to read; this book I anticipated with pleasure and regretted that it was coming to an end.

Strohm's main thesis was that Chaucer was not a famous poet during his own lifetime. Rather, he was a minor royal functionary and bureaucrat in an alienated marriage. His poetry was a hidden vocation known to a small circle before he started to promote himself after his banishment from government. The Canterbury Tales became a Hail Mary pass to achieve posthumous poetic fame. It turns out that Chaucer's efforts coincided well with certain social forces that allowed the creation of a national literature, putting him in an excellent position to be posthumously declared the Father of English Literature.

In my earlier reading about Chaucer, I came away with the impression that he was the court poet for Richard II and a trusted insider within court. I do feel that Strohm deemphasized some aspects of Chaucer's career that would have suggested that Chaucer was more of a trusted insider than Strohm's thesis would indicate. However, Strohm presents evidence that shows Chaucer was less a part of the inner circle than I had been led to believe.

I had imagined that Richard II would have been directly aware of and supportive of Chaucer's literary efforts, but that does not seem to be the case. Instead, the Court needed a hapless flunky to cave in to the corrupt inspection practices of wool customs, so that their cronies could skim money off the tariff, and Chaucer was their man. In the process, they conveniently separated him from his wife, who spent the remainder of her life in leisure at country estates in the circles of the royal court, possibly in the role of a courtesan. No wonder women are often portrayed in a negative light in his poetry.

Strohm deemphasizes Chaucer's participation in royal diplomatic missions. Chaucer spent time in both France and Italy on behalf of the crown, and on each trip, he seems to have absorbed a good deal of the local literature, especially in Italy. Many of Chaucer's works are his own variations on narratives he lifted from either the French or the Italians. What Strohm points out is that on these diplomatic missions, Chaucer was not the lead diplomat, just one of the attendants. Still, these missions show that Chaucer was part of the royal household, possibly taken along on diplomatic missions because of his skill with languages.

Strohm focuses on the year 1386, which was a disastrous year for Chaucer, but one that liberated him from his heavy workload as a customs inspector. Strohm seems to have been inspired by James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. I enjoyed the Shapiro book, but it was a bit heavily crammed with facts. This book is lighter and easier to read.

Personally, I would have liked more information about the rape trial, where Chaucer was accused of raping one Cecily Champagne. After this book was published, later scholarship (around 2019) has indicated that Chaucer might not have been accused of raping Champagne after all. The verb raptus could either mean raping or abducting or contracting for marriage, and it now seems possible that Chaucer had contracted with her to marry his ward, one Edmund Staplegate. Edmund seems to have rejected her as a mate, so she sued for damages.

All in all, an excellent book, both enlightening and entertaining.

Antrim, Donald. The Hundred Brothers. Crown, 1997.

Originally reviewed in 2007 (ELC addendum in 2013): Failed the 'so what' test

The basic plot is as follows: the narrator and most of his 99 brothers are gathering for dinner in the library of their late father's estate. The action takes place from just before dinner to about 2 o'clock the next morning. The narrative ends with the ritual of the Corn King. The style is exaggerated in a magic realist sort of way. Things gradually turn menacing, and the book has a nightmarish though farcical quality. The text is a mere 200 pages of short, declarative sentences.

In a 2007 New York Review of Books article on a later work by Donald Antrim, the reviewer gave a positive review of the new work, but then in a footnote indicated that Antrim's best work was The Hundred Brothers. On the strength of that comment, plus positive Amazon reviews, I put it forward for my book club to read. The fact that the book was out of print and rare even in libraries should have been a hint that it was not a good choice.

We gave it a unanimous thumbs down. What other reviewers and writers of jacket blurbs described as "knee-slapping" gave me a weak smile. The work is a contribution to the canon of works that try to violate the narrative form in a sophisticated way, and I did find it to be interesting in its structure. Even though we all disliked it, the possible symbolism and hints at meaning are enough that we discussed it for an hour and a half. There is enough teasing of significance to chew on and speculate about for the average literature dissertation. However, the book was not that entertaining. Reviewers who raved about this book have probably slogged through some very nasty texts beforehand for the sake of high culture. For them, perhaps, this is a breath of fresh air by comparison. It would be like saying that Piers Plowman was one of the most enjoyable texts of its era. That may be true, but it isn't saying much.

I almost gave the book a thumbs up myself, because I liked the "Edgar Allen Poe meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez" style. However, stylistically, I found some aspects of the prose annoying enough to sour my opinion. Some of the newly married brothers were looking at 18th century pornography. Fine. Did it need to be mentioned so many times? Were there reasons for the repetition, or just a lack of imagination about what else could be said? The text mentions the triplets chasing bats so often, I got sick of them. David Letterman can repeat a dumb joke so often it becomes funny again, but not Antrim. If you want a farcical nightmare, Kafka is still the go-to guy.

I did enjoy the latter half of the book more, as there was more action. But when the characters do not show growth and the meaning of the story is murky, then it better be hilarious. We all agreed that it was not. The question "So what?" was passed over in silence.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discussion elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. The version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: This book is part of a literary tradition that seeks innovative ways of engaging and subverting earlier literary works. It is a short text, more of a novella than a novel. There is very little action. But what action there is strongly references back to the sort of mythic transcendence that comes from such anthropological works as Frazer's Golden Bough, namely, the ritual killing of the representative of a vegetative god, the Corn King in this case. The main character, who is the narrator, has at each of these annual gatherings become the Corn King and has raced through the gauntlet of his brothers, who try to kill him. Their father is a ghostly presence represented by a water stain on the ceiling of the great hall.

The theme of the regeneration of the community certainly has the potential for evolutionary overtones, but they don't seem to be realized. The traditional regeneration theme of Frazer's anthropology seems to be subverted by the treatment. Obviously, if these really are one hundred brothers in a practical and biological sense, their father had high individual reproductive successful.

ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives. It also allows one to critique the quality of a narrative. In this text, there seems to be a desire on the part of the brothers to create a narrative of which they could be part. The narrator ends the book by donning the Corn King rags and racing through the crowd. As for the quality of the narrative, I did not enjoy the book, though it stays with me as memorable. Perhaps there is a school of aesthetics for whom the text is judged beautiful, but IMHO it is not accessible to readers outside of that aesthetic school (in much the same way that the music of Schoenberg is not accessible to those unfamiliar with its aethetic system). I feel like Goliath in the New Yorker cartoon standing in front of the expressionist painting, saying that a five-year-old could have done that. The fact that many Amazon reviews of the book describe Antrim as the most unique writer suggests that he is not going for a mass audience, and the sales numbers agree.

ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. It also can be used as a sign of group membership. As for the first, the book seems to have a foreboding apocalyptic atmosphere. The outside world seems to have fallen apart, and the brothers exist in their own world separated from it. It can also stand as a negative commentary on earlier literary works, such as Yeats's dying god poetry or Joyce's Ulysses. The mystical father figure seems a strange joke, and the text seems to reject the significance of the sacrificial representative of the agricultural cycle.

As for the text being a token of membership in a social group, the group being those who understand the aesthetic basis for the text, then I am afraid that I am not a member of that group. Clearly, some literary community does exist out there that values the aesthetic of this text, for otherwise it would not have been praised in the New York Review of Books.

Camus, Albert. The Stranger (L'Étranger). Trans by Matthew Ward. Vintage International Edition, 1989 (1942).

Originally reviewed in 2013: Not a spare word, but a colonial legacy

I give The Stranger only four stars, even though I am impressed with the craft of its prose and the lean structure. It is a pleasure to read the book. However, Conor Cruise O'Brien made what I consider a valid, important, and negative critique of the book, and I think that O'Brien's commentary should be required reading for students of the text. The simplistic reading of the text as a heroic and wholly positive revolt should not be accepted, but there are good reasons why it has been passionately treasured by generations of (especially young) readers.

In college, I had read some of Camus's philosophical writings, but I had not read The Stranger. In reading the first half now, I am struck by the stylistic similarity to Kafka's writing. According to O'Brien, Camus had been reading Kafka at the time of the composition of this book. Camus was also influenced by the spare style of Hemingway. Kafka was known for eliminating psychology from his narratives.

Likewise, with Camus, the viewpoint is first person, but we get very little psychology of the inner thoughts. There are objective signs that Meursault is mourning for his mother, such as going to bed without dinner, but no statement of feelings of mourning. Hemingway was also a master of things not being spelled out but inferred.

In studying this book, I tracked down and read O'Brien's book Albert Camus, Of Europe and Africa (1970). I consider that criticism very important to a proper understanding of Camus in general and the significance of The Stranger in particular. Specifically, Camus was a French colonist in Algeria who was in denial about his role as a colonist. (France for its part officially claimed that Algeria was not a colony but was part of France, even though a majority of the population were Muslims who did not speak French.) Albert Memmi called such a liberal person 'the colonist who refuses.'

O'Brien argues that the actual killing is treated by everyone, including the author, as irrelevant. "But it is not easy to make the killing of a man seem irrelevant; in fact it can hardly be done unless one is led in some way to regard the man as not quite a man" (25). Earlier critics seemed to want to canonize Meursault and to claim that this novel expressed the conscience of Western man. That may be true, but it also shows the cultural limitations of that conscience with regard to the colony (28).

One could possibly view Meursault as emotionally stunted. He calls his mother "Maman," which is not a name one would use as an adult in public. His emotional obtuseness might also suggest that he falls along the autism spectrum. But one major aspect of the appeal of Meursault and the book itself is the affirmation, his joy of life in the here and now. That does not suggest autism per se. The attitude of revolt against institutions and the celebration of the immediate naturally appeals to college-age students, hence the lasting popularity of the novel.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discussion elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. The version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: So how can the major themes of the book demonstrate valid behavioral strategies within evolutionary psychology? Or how do the common themes within its genre do so?

I see The Stranger as a precursor to such novels as On the Road. The male protagonist lives for today, revolts against the conventions of the society around him. His willingness to be honest about his own feelings is held up as a virtue. But part of why that honesty is shocking is because he often does not care about the feelings of others and certainly has no respect for the legal institutions that embody the collective view of his society. Because he has the daring not to hide his lack of empathy, he is pursuing a high-risk social strategy. If society accepts him on his terms, he will be a potential leader, with the guts to take action fearlessly. So, just as Chicago gangsters of the 1920s or contemporary gang members inspire others by their brazen disregard for the feelings of others, Meursault is held up as a hero.

Just as The Stranger has colonial blind spots, On the Road lets white males reject sexism and racism while at the same time abandoning their women and children, Hispanic and otherwise. In both books, the joy of living and the quest for being true to one's feelings just happens to be consistent with a sexual strategy of siring children by many women. Meursault's answers to Marie's questions about marriage suggest that if a line of women asked him for sex with them, he would not hesitate to oblige. And then he would go out and enjoy getting some sun.

One aspect of pop neuroscience occurred to me in reading this book. Modern brain science sees the prefrontal cortex as the seat of the brain's function of foreseeing consequences and inhibiting unwise behavior. It sees the amygdala as the seat of the animalistic fight-or-flight fear and lust. (One could argue that these brain structures are analogous to Freud's Superego and Id.) Studies have shown that for person's sensitized to group stereotypes, tense intergroup situations cause the amygdala to light up with activity. Studies have also shown that the lower brain systems may have decided on an action before the conscious mind has become aware of the decision. In the book A Question of Freedom, Betts describes his own commission of the crime that got him into prison. He says he cannot understand what possessed him to hijack a white man's car. Perhaps his prefrontal cortex and his conscious mind do not know why he acted, but his amygdala might know. Likewise, Meursault claimed not to understand why he killed the (unnamed) Arab, but perhaps he needed to ask his amygdala.

ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives. In The Stranger, the main character allows the prosecutor to use his reactions to life to create a narrative in which Meursault is a dangerous sociopath. Meursault's own narration of his story is selective and untrustworthy, spinning his story as that of an innocent man. Camus's philosophy of the Absurd specifically focuses on society. The conventions of your society are absurd, so why follow them? The hero follows his Nietzschean integrity, daring his society to punish him for not conforming to the story of being an accepted member. And they do. In the sense that religion is a set of stories that guide our moral universe, Meursault set himself to challenge the stories his fellow French Algerians lived by.

The second point of ELC2: is the narrative a well-told tale? This text is skillfully crafted. With it's stripped down, hybrid Hemingway-Kafka prose, it has the feel of a parable, timeless. It inspires readers today.

Authors can try to aim their work at two (or more) different audiences, but this text does not. Camus himself did not seem to understand his own ambivalent attitude toward native Algerians.

ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. Camus was challenging his fellow French, and all people, to reject the stories of an outmoded social order. To the degree that the cultural revolution of the 1960s overthrew some conventions of Western morality, Camus's campaign succeeded. His blindness to colonial discrimination has also been subtly reinforced in our current society.

The book itself is an indication of a desire to belong to a culturally exclusive group by challenging the reader to reject inconvenient conventions of his society and embrace the enjoyment of the here and now. Some who even like the book reject the challenge.

Cercas, Javier. Soldiers of Salamis. (Soldados de Salamina). Trans. by Anne McLean. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004 (2001).

Originally reviewed in 2013

Cercas' book is a bit of a metatext. It is itself, but it is also the description of the writing of itself. As Cercas recounts, he stumbled across an interesting story that had been frequently told by one of the intellectuals who founded the Falange party. The intellectual, Rafael Sanchez Mazas, escaped a firing squad. Then one of the soldiers sent to hunt for him in the woods finds him but intentionally lets him go. He then befriends some young deserters in the woods who help him survive, and he goes on to become one of the ministers in Franco's first government. A slim 200 pages, it is well-written. There are almost no female characters of merit.

Part one of the book is an account of Cercas learning about the story and initially investigating it. Part two is the part of the Mazas story in the woods for which evidence is minimal and the opportunity for novelistic invention is greatest. The third section is Cercas' effort to complete the story. The Chilian writer Roberto Bolaño makes a surprise appearance in part three, for all you Bolaño fans. I agree with the author that the story was inadequate at the end of part two, and that his efforts to complete it were a success.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discussion elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. The version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: Soldiers of Salamis does deal with an evolutionarily important theme: war. The fascists and the Republicans struggle over control of society. The action that inspired the text was a Republican soldier saving the life of one of the founders of the Falange. It can be seen as a cowardly act: the republicans did not kill all the enemy they could have. It can be seen as an heroic act: because the war was lost, what is the point of another death, when in the end it is life that is important.

Sparing Mazas shows that the Republicans were merciful and through their generosity had deserved to be in power. The savior republican soldier goes on to fight throughout the rest of World War II and to survive and to have a family. The book is in part a memorial to his fallen comrades. Memorials to the fallen soldiers is one of society's ways to ritualize the benefits that they should enjoy for having risked their lives for the current social hegemony. The society will care for the soldier's widow and orphan.

ELC2: Mazas, the dominant character of the story, is a writer. Through his journalism, he helped found and promote the Falange party. His storytelling helped create the reality of the Franco overthrow of the Republic. After his escape from the firing squad, he uses his own tale of salvation, obsessively telling versions of it. One tangible benefit of his story is that he is able to spare the common people who were associated with his rescuers from the violence of the fascist regime.

Cercas himself plays with and transgresses the border between fiction and chronicle. He claims that the text is a novel and professes that he is a liar. Yet it has the feel of an accurate retelling of actual events. In later interviews, he admitted that the entire story of meeting the Republican veteran in France was a fiction, and that is the part of the book that redeems it from being a mediocre text. A professional historian might get upset that the reader might be under the illusion that this is mostly historical with only a trace of fictionalization; whereas, it is more fictional than it appears. A good comparison is to contrast this book with Nerburn's Neither Wolf nor dog. That book is also a blending of fact and fiction, with the plot climax being fiction. The difference? Nerburn allows his book to be shelved as non-fiction, while Cercas has insisted that his text is fiction.

As far as the quality of the story, the reader might get annoyed with the author (or author/character) for name-dropping and for an egotism which he tries to cover-up with professions of modesty. If one stops reading after just the first two sections, the story isn't very good. It is open to debate as to whether the third section redeems the text. The author/character admits that Mazas isn't a very nice guy, and the reader might decide that the author/character isn't very admirable either. One can argue that the theme of the book is: what is a hero? The final soldier is an unsung hero, for whom the author/character sings. One can argue that the text is artistically successful from the point of view of transcending the borders of fiction and non-fiction in an engaging way.

ELC3: What is the subtext or cultural context of the text? The author/character comes across as a liberal in an open society who is trying to come to terms with the fascist past and with the repeated story of the salvation of one of its founders. What does it mean? In the end, it is not the fascist but the Republican who emerges as the hero. As his lover tells the author/character: don't write about a fascist, find a communist, that will make a good book.

How does the title factor into the story? Some of the soldiers of Salamis were the few Greek soldiers that saved Western Civilization from the invasion of the Persians. Mazas had envisaged the fascists as the few soldiers who through violence save the traditional society from revolution. The text in the end sees the Republican veteran as one of the few soldiers who saved an open society from the threat of Hitler's conquest.

At another level, the retreating Persian soldiers are the soldiers of Salamis. The Greeks wrote a tragedy called "The Persians" which was very sympathetic to the tragic defeat of the Persians. The retreating Republican soldier decided to spare Mazas. Dignity in defeat. But in this case, the defeated soldiers see victory in the end.

The book also establishes a test of social class, between those who appreciate a transgressive metatext and those who are offended by the snootiness of it.

Dorner, Marjorie. Winter Roads, Summer Fields: Stories. Milkweed Editions, 2000.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Well written, nostalgic

This collection of short stories chronicles lives in a small town in the upper Midwest between 1930 and 1970. They are well-wrought, capturing both details of observation and a fine understanding of human nature. Cruelty, love, social acceptance of retardation, and loneliness are all dealt with in the tales. My favorite was "Burying Pal," which tells of a man remembering his best horse as he buries it. It humorously recounts the personalities of many other horses that did not work out so well.

Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. (Nome della rosa). Translated by William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Originally reviewed in 2020: Classic Murder Mystery and Semiotics

When The Name of the Rose was published in English in 1983, it became a best-seller, much to the surprise of industry insiders and the author. I have heard that it was very fashionable to buy it and say that you had read it, but that the number of people who had actually read it was a bit lower. Still, the fundamentals of the book allow it to have a broad appeal, despite the fact that the author was a professor of philosophy, communication and literary theory (semiotics was his primary area). It appeals both to a sophisticated cultural taste and to the hunger of the murder mystery addict. I think it holds up well thirty-five years later. But moderate your expectations: considering that it takes place in a medieval abbey, don't look for many strong female characters (to say nothing of non-Europeans). And it does get a bit into the philosophical weeds.

As for the murder mystery, Eco plays to the PBS masses. The main character is William of Baskerville, and, as one might expect, he is a Sherlock Holmes type. Traveling through northern Italy, he is asked by the abbot to solve a mysterious death. The action of the book takes place over the course of a week, and each day, another mysterious death occurs. The perpetrator is an unexpected character, and the climactic scene of the book has all the reveal of a classic whodunit. Wisely, Eco limits the intellectual digressions to the point where reading the book is not like wearing a hairshirt to prove that you are a member of the cultural elite.

As for intellectual heft, the act of solving a mystery involves interpreting signs. Thus, Eco has plenty of opportunity to play with the concepts of semiotics. (He even references Jorge Borges on a couple of different levels.) Second, the text that many of the characters are competing to find (the McGuffin if you will) is Aristotle's lost book on comedy, and that fact gives Eco the chance to discuss the nature of humor and the purpose of comedy. (In his scholarship, Eco has articulated a theory of humor and comedy, and his theory of the nature of carnival is still quoted in academic texts.) Finally, the setting of a medieval abbey allows Eco to explore the details of political and cultural struggle that took place within the Roman Catholic church during the 1300s, a struggle that Eco uses to comment on the politics within Italian society during the 1970s.

My own mother was both well-educated and a murder mystery addict, and this book was pitched to her wheelhouse, as they say. Certainly, in the 1980s there was a large reading public for murder mysteries, this being the generation right after Agatha Christie had led the genre. Many mystery readers were, like my mother, attracted to what was perceived to be high-brow culture: classical music, British shows on public television, etc. A scholar who also wrote a good whodunit with a British sleuth therefore had a large audience, some of whom were not willing to admit that they would not actually slog through a treatise on the politics of the medieval church.

The story then became a successful film. The director rewrote the ending to conform more to movie audience expectations (the one woman in the tale is rescued instead of burned at the stake), and there was far less discussion of theology, but the basic elements were still present. Because of the success of the novel and the film, Eco's next book, Foucault's Pendulum, sold briskly. However, in that second novel Eco made the post-modern rejection of traditional narrative so ponderous that it flopped badly. It was perceived to be exactly the sort of stereotypic book you would expect from a clueless professor of philosophy. At the time, I received at least three hardback copies of Foucault's Pendulum, which were regifted to me from various relatives, including one from my mother. Eco's reputation as a novelist did not recover until decades later when he wrote The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, his next to last novel.

All in all, The Name of the Rose is still a good book. Sophisticated enough for the intellectual, yet not so ponderous that it snubs the middle-brow masses. But please don't send me any more copies of Foucault's Pendulum!

Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Modern Library, 1950 (Originally 1749).

Originally written in 2013: Modern novel from the Eighteenth Century

I was very surprised when I finally got around to reading Tom Jones: it is a very amusing and enjoyable novel, not at all a Mark Twain classic (which is a novel you enjoy saying you have read more than you enjoy actually reading). I read it one brief chapter at a time each night during a phase of my life when I suffered from insomnia, and it did not put me to sleep. (For that, I recommend reports of scientific investigations, which even when they are interesting require a lot of mental exertion.) A warning though: Fielding's eighteenth-century morality is definitive not Victorian or politically correct by today's standards. It is both too promiscuous for the Victorians and too patriarchal for today's feminist. It has a little bit of the zaniness of Tristam Shandy, but it is not that confusing.

As an English major, I did not take a course that covered the history of the novel. I had read a number of nineteenth century novels (Austen, Dickens, Thackery, Hawthorne, Twain, etc.), and early twentieth century novels (Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Joseph Roth, Dos Passos, etc.), but I had not had to dip into the eighteenth-century novel. I naively believed that the avant-garde techniques of breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader was a twentieth-century phenomenon. How wrong I was. Each of the many books into which the novel is divided begins with an essay to the reader. These essays might meditate on the nature of fiction, or the class of society which breeds the best novelist, or some other thoughts about existence.

The plot of the novel follows the strange career of an orphan, Tom Jones, who is remarkably well-endowed in looks, in temperament, and perhaps in other ways. He is raised by a wealthy country gentleman. The gentleman's nephew and apparently sole heir is Tom's nefarious opposite, and the nephew is out to try to ruin Tom at every turn. Meanwhile, many of the women in the book stalk Tom, and the ending is a thrilling race between his rescuer and those leading him to the gallows. Fielding clearly has fun with the cultural and philosophical currents of his era. It is justifiably considered one of the great novels of English literature. And it's actually fun.

For an evolutionary literary criticism viewpoint, the sexual dynamics are fairly straightforward to lay out. Powerful men can sire children with working poor women on their estates without too much stigma against them when it comes to marriage and respectability. Tom's rival is trying to ensure his own financial legacy at Tom's expense. Tom's true love will have to look past all the women he has incidentally shagged if she wants to marry him. It was against this promiscuous exercise of social power that Victoria's Prince Albert campaigned in British society. But it is an exercise of power that David Buss and other evolutionary psychologists could predict.

Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. William Morrow, 2001. Tenth anniversary edition: 2011.

Originally reviewed in 2022: Memerdämmerung

American Gods is a sprawling adventure story which comes out of the science fiction and fantasy tradition, and it is accessible to teen-agers, especially boys. Though the author himself might or might not be aware of this, it is also a critique of religion, Christianity in particular. To me, a negative aspect of the novel is that its philosophical framework has contradictions. Because of its lack of subtlety and its inconsistencies, I cannot give it my highest endorsement, but if you think that all religions are memes, and you are looking for a page-turner with depth, you might really like this book.

SPOILER ALERT: Surprise plot twists will be discussed below. Do not read this review if you want to enjoy them as surprises.

While it might be frustrating for some, I think the lack of subtlety is useful for readers who might not be quick on the uptake. For example, after the main character, Shadow, arrives at Rock City from the Tree of the World, he has a long conversation with Loki about what has happened up to that point. That discussion feels to me like a detailed recap of major sections of the story for readers who have not caught all the intricacies of the plot. Likewise, the discussion between Shadow and Hinzelmann near the end of the novel lays out further points of the story. If you miss a detail the first time around, there will be a summary.

Different Types of Magic

American Gods comes out of the science fiction and fantasy tradition. It is useful to stop and discuss two ways magic can be portrayed in fiction: the technique of magic realism versus the technique of magic in fantasy and science fiction.

In a work of magic realism, such as in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the presentation of the world is generally as we live it, but there are times when cause and effect breakdown and things happen for no reason, such as when one of the characters always has a flock of yellow butterflies over his head. It is not that there are new rules; sometimes there are no rules.

In the genre of science fiction and related fantasy, the chain of cause and effect does not breakdown, but the world has rules other than the rules that govern our lives. In fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter series, when Harry casts a spell, he has to have the right wand and say the right words, and the spell travels through air at a given speed before striking its target. In a science fiction setting like the Star Trek franchise, the people can travel faster than the speed of light, but they need dilithium crystals. Cause and effect do not breakdown; there are just new types of causes and effects. The magic of American Gods seems to fall in this second category.

The political metaphors that can be drawn from the two kinds of magic are generally quite different. Writers like Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie seem to use magic realism to criticize the science and technology which has been used by western culture in the last few centuries to assert economic hegemony over the globe. Magic realism seems to say that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio's scientific philosophy. By contrast, the magic of science fiction and fantasy is more like the advanced technology that magic realism is criticizing. Harry Potter goes to an elite school to learn esoteric knowledge with which he can control the world around him.

The class appeal of these political metaphors is the opposite of what one might expect. In our culture, the educated class is sensitive to the oppressive qualities of advanced technology, so the critique of strict cause and effect is more appealing to the elite, while the science fiction and fantasy version of magic is more appealing to a mass audience because it empowers characters to assert control over their surroundings. I once pointed out to a literature professor who taught Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children that the only two genuine witches in that novel have the same names as the two witches in Harry Potter who are of South Asian ancestry, suggesting that Rowling was referencing Rushdie. The professor was appalled. The middle-brow fantasy of elite Hogwarts was giving a shout-out to Rushdie's Ivy League post-colonial magic realism.

To bring this discussion back to American Gods, in this novel Shadow's wife is allowed to come back from the dead. She can do so, though, only because Shadow gave her a special magical coin. She wants to be brought back to life fully. He discovers that the only way to do such a thing is to kill a god-like thunderbird and take a special stone from its skull. He decides not to kill a thunderbird to bring her back. Likewise, to resurrect Shadow, the goddess Easter has to follow certain procedures. Causes have effects, and effects have causes.

Memetics

The theory of memes, which has been popularized by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, holds that ideas within our minds are packets of information in the same way that genes within our cells are packets of information. Just as we can study biology through genetics, we can study human culture through memetics. Ideologies and systems of thought are organisms built out of the instructions contained within their memes. Dawkins, Dennett, and company carry the metaphor further, claiming that the human mind is a fertile soil in which these ideological organisms grow and compete with each other in a form of Darwinian natural selection. Memetics is the basis upon which people claim that ideas on the Internet "go viral."

Dawkins has held up as the authoritative study of memetics a book by Susan Blackmore called The Meme Machine. In my review of that book back in 2012, I criticized the theory of memetics. My critique was not original; I borrowed it (with attribution) from Steven Pinker's book How the Mind Works. I believe that Pinker's critique still stands. As I said then: "Memetics as a science is still dead."

In American Gods, the various gods in the narrative go extinct when there are no longer people who believe in them. At the beginning of chapter eighteen, the narrator says outright that religion is fundamentally a metaphor and a way of perceiving the world. This position is fundamentally secular. One can understand why gods can glide in and out of the narrative: they are not independent entities but are composed of active memes. Dawkins of course is a public advocate for atheism, and this approach to gods is not inconsistent with that critical view of religion. I am not saying that the book is necessarily bad because it approaches religion as a fictional thing, I am just pointing out that it views religion from a theory of memetics.

A secular view of religion does not weaken the book, but the book's metaphysical inconsistency does weaken it. That inconsistency is related to Gaiman's handling of memes. On the one hand, gods are memes, and they weaken and disappear when they lose believers. But on the other hand, the adventure story features gods fighting each other. They are capable of being killed in the book's climactic battle of the gods. There seems to be a science fiction and fantasy form of magic in which they can fight each other and be killed in a way that is separate from losing human believers. These different views of the nature of the gods contradict each other. Which is it? Are they memes, or are they characters in a superhero movie? Gaiman seems to want to have it both ways, and as a result, the book is a muddle.

Christianity

I listened to an interview done with Gaiman soon after he wrote the first edition of the book. I also listened to the audio version of the revised tenth anniversary edition. At the end of the revised edition, he had an appendix which contained a deleted scene with Jesus and Shadow. Based on those two discussions, I am fairly certain that Gaiman did not see the book as a critique of Christianity per se. He has said that he thought the book's second main character was America itself. He had tried in both the first edition and in the revision to include a section with Jesus, but he left it out both times because it didn't work.

A friend of mine pointed out that you cannot write a book about America and about religion in America without Christianity having a major or even dominant role. My thought is: you can if you do not actually believe in religion. Christianity is too real. You cannot just treat it directly as a passing fad. This idea got me to think that the book was actually about Christianity.

In American Gods, the main god character is a manifestation of the Norse god Odin who goes by the name Wednesday. It turns out that Shadow is the son of Wednesday. The book claims that historically there had been an ancient Norse ceremony of sacrifice to Odin where on each of nine days nine animals including one human are hanged, and then the side of each animal is pierced by a spear. (By saying "claims," I am not disputing Gaiman's scholarship, but I am not personally a scholar knowledgeable about this tradition.)

In this novel, when Shadow pledges to work with Wednesday, one of the details is that if Wednesday dies, Shadow holds a vigil for him. Only when Wednesday dies does Shadow learn that the vigil is one where Shadow is tied up in a tree for nine days, including a rope around his neck. When Shadow is strapped into the tree, he has visions, then dies, goes to Hades, and has his soul weighed and judged. His soul passes the judgment, and he chooses to pass into the void. Later, his soul is pulled back from the void, and he is resurrected by the goddess Easter so that he can help in the great battle of the gods.

In one of the story's better twists, the entire battle of the gods is a trick engineered by Wednesday and his accomplice, Loki. The battle is magically dedicated to Odin so that all the psychic energy generated by it goes to reviving Odin from death and making him stronger. The battle is a con game played on the other gods. Shadow's sacrifice in the vigil was part of the con.

It doesn't take much to see that Wednesday can stand in for the traditional Christian God. Shadow is the sacrificed son of God. Instead of the Christian act of dying for the salvation of all humanity, Shadow dies to revive the meme of Odin. But Odin / God is running a con game. The sacrifice is a selfish ploy by Wednesday, and the resurrected Shadow saves the day for the other gods by giving a speech before the battle revealing the con and getting all the other gods to lay down their arms. You, followers of memetics, can have your peaceful pantheon of viral gods because the cause of Shadow / Christ was part of a con game, and the Christian God has been revealed as a fraud. No wonder Gaiman could not figure out how to fit the actual Jesus into the story: he is already the main character, critiquing the claim that religion is more than a metaphor and meme.

Multi-culturalism and Dominant White Culture

Turning away from the topic of Christianity, American Gods manages to satisfy a social value of promoting multi-culturalism while still putting western culture first. By having a pantheon of gods, Gaiman can have Sub-Saharan gods, South Asian gods, Egyptian gods, etc. These gods tend to be on the original "good guys" side of the ledger. (Until the end of the story, the old traditional gods are implied to be good, while the new gods of Media and the Internet are bad. That orientation dissolves at the end of the book.)

Gaiman does a careful dance with the inclusion of Native Americans. Technically, there are no Native American gods in the story, but references to Native American culture abound. Gaiman seems to include as much Native American culture as he can without being accused of cultural appropriation. Because he sees America itself as a major character in the book, he cannot ignore that culture, and to me he seems to hit the right balance. I have not investigated how the book was received by those who are sensitive to issues of Native American cultural appropriation.

The god with the most copy in the novel is the Norse god Wednesday, a god from a very White culture. At the end of the novel, he and the Norse Loki are portrayed as the real bad guys. They were trying to engineer a mass slaughter of gods for their own selfish benefit. One can argue on the surface that this casts a negative light on the European part of the pantheon.

On the other hand, most of the gods in the crowd are not strong actors in the story. Wednesday and Loki might be bad, but they have agency. As Peter Thiel once said, I would rather people call me evil than incompetent. The main character, Shadow, who saves the day for both the gods in the pantheon and the people of the town of Lakeside, is Wednesday's son and an heir to the northern European tradition. Gaiman can have his multi-cultural cake and eat White primacy, too.

The biggest surprise for me was the fact that, fairly late in the book, it is revealed that Shadow is of mixed race. One can infer that his mother was Black (and his father was a Norse god). This detail is slipped in quietly during a flashback to his mother's death. There, Shadow is briefly described as having a coffee and cream complexion; his mother's cancer was at first diagnosed as a flair-up of her sickle cell anemia. When this story was made into a television series, a Black actor played Shadow.

Nowhere in the story does a detail hinge on racial discrimination against Shadow. His race is invisible as a social fact. Just as Christianity is invisible in the book, so is race. The message seems to be that it is not a big deal that the heir to northern European culture is a person of color. The novel also reveals that the idyllic (White) small town of Lakeside has been ruled by a goblin who demands human sacrifice. So much for rural midwestern culture. Shadow is the person in the book with the most agency, and he carries on aspects of White culture as part of a non-White multiculturalism.

To me, the fact that Shadow is non-white dramatically changes the meaning of the vigil. A Black man being hung in a tree as part of a religious ritual has a much different meaning than anyone else. None of these implications are explored by the book.

Haynes, Natalie. A Thousand Ships: a Novel. Harper, 2021.

Originally reviewed in 2022: Good general overview of Greek literature from the perspective of women

Haynes has retold the stories of ancient Greece from the point of view of the women. The job is serviceable. The problem is that one is regularly reminded that the author is saying, "Look at us, too!" She cannot dodge the fact that the men were the primary agents in her story. Despite the validity of her perspective, it can be wearisome. The woman who whines the most, justifiably, is Penelope. Again, this is an okay book. If you want to experience the stories related to the Homeric epics in a modern novel, and if you want to see them through the eyes of the women, this is a good novel. It is also a good overview of Greek mythology generally.

I am not a student of Greek literature. Until I learned it from this book's Afterword, I did not know that the classical civilization of ancient Greece took the narrative context of the Iliad and the Odyssey and retold the narrative from other points of view. Euripides, for example, had already written tragedies from the point of view of the women, such as The Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Aulis, and Hecuba. Haynes cites Euripides as a major influence.

Most of this novel is told in first-person without flashbacks or flashforwards. Haynes uses several techniques to escape from this constraint. First, occasionally, the first-person narrator is Calliope, the muse of eloquence and epic poetry. In one of those chapters, Haynes lays out the book's thesis: "The casualties of war aren't just the ones who die. And a death off the battlefield can be more noble and heroic than one in the midst of fighting." The stories of the women who suffer are just as important as the stories of the men in battle. The flaw with this argument is that what happens among the men on the battlefield decides which group of women will suffer most.

Another vehicle Haynes uses for jumping around the timeline is Cassandra, a daughter of Priam who is given the ability to see the future but the curse that no one will believe her. With Cassandra, Haynes can jump backward and forward in the timeline. She also has letters from Penelope to Odysseus. I find these implausible, because the two could not have been in communication during his ten-year voyage. But they allow the author to summarize the Odyssey.

One of the strongest proponents of evolutionary literary criticism has been Jonathan Gottschall (though his later work has gone a little off the deep end—did anyone say "cage fighting"?). His dissertation studied the Iliad from the point of view of evolutionary fitness. "A Thousand Ships" underscores the appropriateness of an evolutionary perspective on the Homeric legends. The men undertake high risk behavior in their wars. The women of the losing side are enslaved by the victors, who can then father children by them. Survival of the fitness in its most stark rendering: the defeated males failing to pass on their genes except through their enslaved daughters, and the victors passing on many copies of their genes through both wives and captive slave women. Haynes does not argue against this interpretation.

One curious element of the Haynes book is that the war has been started by the gods because the human population has growth too large. Gaia is suffering from all the humans. The war will thin the population. This theme seems to be a message about environmentalism: we need to control our population.

This perspective adds a strange twist to how the reader understands the story. The slaughter of war becomes necessary to keep the human population in check. For much of the book, the reader is prompted to think of the senselessness of war, and the tragic suffering of the women. On the other hand, if war is necessary to reduce the human population, then the senseless tragedy is not so senseless. The suffering is akin to the suffering of the cattle at the slaughterhouse, a Malthusian method of population control. This shift in how the reader is supposed to view the story's bloodshed is jarring.

Haynes wants to push home the thesis that women can be as heroic as men, even in the Greek epics. But if the slaughter is necessary to reduce the population, then what is the meaning of any of the heroism? It is necessary suffering, endured with the stoicism of the condemned.

Apparently, Haynes has stated that the Golden Apple is the motif that ties the book together. I don't see that, unless the Golden Apple also symbolizes a sustainable Earth with a right-sized human population. Perhaps it symbolizes the inability of women to get along. Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera caused the war at one level, because each wanted to be judged most beautiful. Again, the claim that the Golden Apple is crucial does not work for me.

Heinz, W. C. (Wilfred Charles). The Professional. New York, Harper, 1958.

Originally reviewed in 2020

SPOILER ALERT: The ending of the book will be discussed.

This book, written and set in the 1950s, had disappeared from the canons of literature until Elmore Leonard declared that it was a pioneering work that led to his own style. Like the boxer it describes, it is lean and well-crafted. Hemingway praised this novel, and it is very much in the style of Hemingway. Spare. Mostly dialogue. Stoic. Male-centric. There is a subtext of racial acceptance between blacks and whites. This book has a similar plot to the original movie Rocky, but more spare in its approach and more tragic. Well-done, but bordering on cliché, to say nothing about sexism.

The book is disciplined in its style. It is a first-person account describing a boxer as he trains and fights for the title of middle-weight champion of the world. The narrator is Frank, a sports writer who has been hired by a major magazine to write an in-depth piece on the challenger, Eddie Brown. It opens with Frank traveling for the first time to Eddie's house. It is a step up from a working-class tenement, a small house on a block of small houses with a ten-by-ten yard. The wife Helen is wary, afraid that Frank will make her husband look bad.

The potential for the book to be a cliché is great. Many of the characters can be summed up by an adjective: the dutiful boxer, the ambitious wife, Doc Carroll, the crusty manager, Johnny Jay, the long-winded trainer, the Memphis Kid, the quiet black and a true professional who does not bring his ego into his boxing or life. The narrator is the cynical sportswriter who quietly loves these guys. Even the arc of the story fits a standard sports narrative, the arduous climb, the tragic defeat. What saves the book is the clean delivery and the humor bubbling below the dead-pan of the dialogue.

There are moments when the writer gets poetic about the scenery. Heinz is generally understated, letting the facts show the reader. His flattering description of Eddie's body is almost homo-erotic. Whether or not there is any conscious desire for a physical relationship, it is clear that the narrator admires this fighter. There are also moments toward the end of the book when Doc and Frank get philosophical. Frank argues that all of life is a struggle and combat, what is great about boxing is that it is honest about that fact.

The book has a broad theme of boxing as an art form. The trainer is said to sculpt the fighter, chipping away at his bad habits to form the work of art. The true professional boxer is clean in his execution of moves. Doc is the artist, Eddie is his block of marble.

The rabble in the audience generally don't understand the art form. They want to see dramatic head snaps and blood. Eddie and Memphis do not fight for the philistines in the crowd, they fight for the connoisseur who understands the beauty of it. When Memphis fought in Australia, he was careful not to humiliate anyone. He made the fights seem close, even though he was in control. The other boxer and the audience didn't understand what they were seeing. Memphis usually wins by decision, and he is a disappointment to the rabble.

I believe that Heinz's prose reflects the same philosophy of art. The writing is lean, spare. The plot is not flashy with orphans and evil enemies. The humor and warmth is below the facade of grim machismo. Like the boxers, Heinz is a professional with his craft. Clean beauty, not fireworks. The fame of the world goes to the artists whom the crowd loves. Just as Memphis slips through the world without the title, this book has slipped through the culture with little fanfare. Heinz follows his stoic path whether the broad readership notices or not. Heinz said he only received two fan letters about the book: one from Hemingway, and one from Elmore Leonard.

With regard to women, there are hardly any in the book, and those who are there do not fare well. Other books such as Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow do not explicitly state a sexist belief in the inferiority of women, they just focus on men. This book is sexist in a more formal sense. In the big speech where Frank explains his theory of boxing to Eddie, Frank very explicitly says that women simply cannot understand men and their world of commerce and fighting. If one wanted to condemn this book by current socially liberal standards, this sexism would be exhibit one.

Regarding race, you do not learn until about the middle of the book that the always unnamed champ is black, and then only in passing. The last two chapters of the novel are the fight and the post-fight. But nowhere in those two chapters is there a hint of race, which I find implausible for New York in the 1950s. No racial heckling or comments. Hence my claim that the book has a subtext of racial comity. In its mix of racial harmony and sexism, this book shares a position similar to Faulkner's work. With Faulkner, the men of different races often get along, it is the women who mess things up.

There are high jinks at the camp. Penna likes to pull tricks on a heavyweight, Schaeffer, and his manager, Polo. This too is almost cliché. But it is a lot of fun. After Eddie loses, we have only one last scene which suggests that after the title bout his life did not go well. One is left with a vague sadness. Like Beowulf, he was great in that time and in this place, but not for all time and everywhere. Achievement fades. Beowulf has a similar theme of men being the play things of fate, and it has a similar fatalism toward things of this world.

In terms of style, we learn slowly about Eddie's life. Frank picks up details gradually as he interacts with people, from Helen, from Eddie after Helen's visit, from Eddie's old gang who visit. We learn a good bit about Memphis from his reminiscences, and we learn about boxing. The novel is a teasing out in the present the past of these characters, building them up so that the reader can understand how Eddie's loss ruins his life, Doc's life, Frank's efforts on his story, etc. Most of the novel is there to make the climax into a true tragedy.

Humor is an important part of the book. There are not a lot of direct jokes, but humor structures the serious content. Frank first brings up the topic of Tony Zale with a slapstick story about boiling water. Then he uses Zale and Graziano to illustrate his sermon that life is survival of the fittest. Frank sums up: "It was like two prehistoric monsters, knee-deep in the primeval ooze, ready to fight to the death and with the jungle all around them echoing to the noise and the horror of it." Then Eddie delivers the rim-shot line: "It was that good a fight?"

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discussion elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. The version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: A sports story usually lends itself easily to ELC1: the contest is a ritual enactment of combat, in which the winner gains status and often extra resources. This book is even more explicit than most about the connection between sports and combat for social dominance. In chapter 19, Eddie asks Frank "How come you like boxing so much?" Frank gives Eddie a lecture about how we humans still have some of the animal in us, we are attracted to competition. It ends with the line about monsters in the jungle. Boxing is the most pure form of that combat, knocking someone else senseless.

The book explicitly debates the value of boxing. A TV hostess, Bunny Williams, invites Eddie onto her show, but then grills him about whether it is right that he should make a living trying to beat another man senseless. After the show, Frank goes on his famous walk with Eddie explaining to him Frank's theory about the honesty of boxing. In another vignette, one of Eddie's friends explains that Eddie was not the toughest guy in their neighborhood. The toughest guy, Tony, used to pick fights with the cops, but when he died in Iwo Jima, he was given the Silver Star. Sometimes the combat is criminal, and sometimes you are given a medal.

The book shows a boxer who did everything right, but who at the moment of truth lost control of his anger and missed the punch. His wife married him because she was ambitious, and he was her best prospect. But she didn't want to be subservient to his mission to be a great boxer. She was at cross purposes with Doc, the higher status manager who knew how to guide Eddie to greatness. We are left wondering at the end of the book whether Helen stayed with Eddie after his defeat or left him.

The fate of the almost great is tragic, the fall of the mighty. Flesch argues that our brains are wired to have strong emotions around this victory or defeat. The fallen hero evokes deep sadness. Repeatedly, it is emphasized that Eddie was the more deserving fighter. The book suggests that in the wider world, he will be forgotten. It is also a defeat for Frank. No one wants to read a story about a loser. So the novel is the memorial, claiming that Eddie deserves more remembrance than the unnamed champion. It turns Eddie into the hidden hero. A Lost Cause.

ELC2: In this book, there is a tension between being a true professional and being a showman. The audience wants to see drama, and they do not understand that flashy action is not good boxing technique. Memphis is the quiet professional, doing his job with artistry, but disappointing the hoi polloi. Memphis in Australia made the matches look close, giving the spectators a fiction that they craved.

A sports contest is a ritual with a built-in plot structure. It is a formal contest, a ready-made narrative with its own set of variations. The spectator knows the basic narrative, looks for the memorable variations. Your team will either win or lose, but it won't break into a dance number. This structure makes a sporting event a reliable narrative, but it also means that the narrative cannot surprise beyond the limits of the rules. The grandeur is less grand, the defeat is less total.

In the world of combat, the socially constructed world of what should be and whose turn it is smacks into the reality of the knockout punch. Doc can say that Eddie was the better fighter, that he should have won, but Eddie was knocked out in the first round. The champ was flashier than Eddie, and Eddie had more techniques in his toolkit, but when that moment of error opened up, the champ through practiced reflex was able to deliver a blow that scrambled Eddie's brains. Immediately after the fight, Eddie was cognitively impaired. His humiliation was total.

The second point of ELC2: is the narrative a well-told tale? It is a well-told tale. The writer is even conscious of the comparison between boxing as an art and writing as an art. His Hemingway-esque style is professional workmanship, not hyperbole. Elmore Leonard was so impressed that he started a correspondence with Heinz and learned from his skill.

Unfortunately, the frame of the sports story restricts the writer. The plot follows the structured contest. The protagonist either wins or loses. A common plot is early victory, defeat in the middle, then final triumph. This plot is less typical: the protagonist fails in the final combat.

One can argue that the book itself failed in the world of letters. If you search the MLA Bibliography (2020) for "Primary author" Heinz and "Primary work" Professional, you only get one scholarly article about this book. (By comparison, if you search for "Primary author" Elmore Leonard, you get fifty-four.) As I have said, it has only been revived to live again thanks to Leonard, who saw it as formative toward his own genre of the hard-boiled detective.

The detective is also a combatant, fighting crime. He has to follow rules, the criminals do not. The social structure may have given the criminal license to operate, and the detective may be threatening the social order. But the crime novel is more successful than the sports novel. Why? Because the detective is an altruistic punisher, bringing our collective enemies to account. The athlete, perhaps just as valiant, is just trying to be the best contestant. We care more about the detective, because what he or she does really counts.

Authors can try to aim their work at two (or more) different audiences. This novel does. The sports fan can enjoy the book for its focus on the contest, the discriminating reader can enjoy the craft of its style and delivery and the unity of the content and the form. Again, as Leonard explains in his Forward to the book, the only two people to write Heinz about the book soon after it was published were Elmore Leonard and Hemingway. Leonard went on to be a friend of Heinz, and he took that craft into a genre that appealed to the rabble by showing more blood and more altruism.

ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. The Professional had very little cultural impact. It probably would have disappeared if Leonard had not revived it. But it is known among a small Elect.

What cultural norms are promoted by this text, even if indirectly? And does appreciation of this text denote membership within a human social group?

The book very clearly and explicitly presents the male world of sport as a place of competition which excludes women. And it includes the fatalism that pervades other male-centric works of literature. But it also denotes membership in a group that rejects false shows of dominance; competent skill is what is treasured. Be a professional, know the inner secrets of the initiated. Deliver to the phony the Moment of Truth.

Hornby, Nick. How to be Good. Riverhead Books, 2001.

Originally reviewed in 2011: Fun book, a bit magic realist

A funny account of a woman's troubled marriage. The book starts with the narrator in an unhappy marriage to a difficult and angry man. Then the man meets a stranger who might be—the book is tantalizingly ambiguous—the second coming of Christ. The husband then rejects all of his old, mean-spirited ways and becomes saintly. The humorous twist is that the saintly husband is just as difficult to get along with as his old, selfish, sinner self. But now the wife has the added frustration of hating someone who is clearly a good person. Probably not as well-written as High Fidelity.

Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria. Sagamore Press, 1957 / 1894.

Originally reviewed in 2015: Utopian novel of Christian Socialism

This text, one even hesitates to call it a novel, was a plea written in 1894 for America to embrace the concept of Christian socialism. This book is an interesting period piece as an example of didactic literature, but it has almost no merit as fiction. The characters are nearly caricatures, although the prose is competently constructed. There is not much plot. The dialogue is simply a way to present melodramatically the political and economic position of William Dean Howells. Towards the end of the text, the visitor from Altruria gives a lecture on how the society of Altruria is structured, and that vision is just as bogus as the plot.

Howells was a well-respected novelist and influential magazine editor who furthered the careers of both Mark Twain and Henry James. The social context of the publication was that there was a massive economic depression in 1894, with many workers thrown out of jobs and widespread unrest. Monopolies, especially in the railroads, were seen as the gilded age rich strangling the lower classes.

One should contrast A Traveler from Altruria with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), another example of didactic utopian literature and one which influenced Howell. Bellamy at least had a budding romance to keep the interest of the readers from flagging and a fantasy world of modern technology as utopia. Not so with Altruria. Bellamy's utopia is more plausible than Howells. The utopian vision of Howells is very rural, whereas, that of Bellamy is urban and industrial. Howell's vision doesn't even make sense: he assumes some high-tech infrastructure (such as high speed electrical rail service) in this bucolic, rural utopia, which would not have had the capital to invest in that infrastructure. Altruria is a thinly disguised version of 1890s America after a social revolution where everyone decided to go back to the land.

Nevertheless, the book, originally serialized in a magazine, was influential enough to spawn "Altrurian councils" in various parts of the United States and an intentional community near Berkeley, CA, in 1895. That commune fell apart within two years, but some of the efforts continued. The political impact of this book was less than the impact of Bellamy's work, and justifiably so.

Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the dog). H. Holt and Co., 1890.

Originally reviewed in 2012 (ELC addendum in 2013): Perhaps the funniest book in the English language

I feel that this book is one of the funniest books in the English language; however, that is with the proviso that one does not object strongly to humor based on stereotypes, of which this book has a lot. Most of the best humor in the book is not stereotype-based, so, even if one does object to such humor, one can still enjoy many parts of the book. Indeed, the biggest laughs are at the expense of the narrator and his friends. Written in the late 19th century, it is the tale of three foppish young men trying to take a rowing vacation along the Thames with their dog. The plot is generally an excuse to set up short humorous vignettes and situations.

The beginning of the book is a bit slow, certainly when compared to the best parts. If you are not sure that you will enjoy the book, try leafing forward until you get to either the essay on cheese or the vignette of the narrator's Uncle Podger. Those are early episodes that well characterize the best of the humor.

A word of warning: the book does use the n-- word once, but the reference to Blacks is mercifully brief. Nevertheless, that part is offensive to modern sensibilities in a way that the stereotype of, say, a German generally is not. (I was reading the vignette of Herr Schlossen-Boschen to my wife, when I had to stop, lay on the ground, and laugh for a full five minutes. Again, the humor here was mostly at the expense of the narrator, and not the German.)

I discovered this book because Wallace Tripp had excerpted a vignette and turned it into a children's book, entitled My Uncle Podger. That book characterizes well the style of the rest of Jerome's book. Even at the ages of six and four, my daughters loved both the story of Uncle Podger and the essay on cheese.

There was a sequel to Three Men in a Boat, entitled Three Men on the Bummel, but that book relies even more on stereotypic humor, has an even longer section at the expense of Blacks, and, while it has a few very good vignettes (the sketch that features the line "do you sell shoes here?" probably influenced the dead parrot sketch of Monty Python, for example), it is generally not as funny as this first book.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discussion elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. The version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: This book is especially challenging to fit into the mold of evolutionary psychology. There is no bold hero who saves the day or gets the girl or dies tragically while trying to do either one. All comedy has a general problem with such a perspective. In comedy, the protagonist is often ridiculous. He or she often suffers minor misfortunes, though as Hugh Atkinson has pointed out, they are never fatal. Those incidents often lower the victim of misfortune's status. The humor in this particular book is often self-deprecating, humor in which the narrator and his chums have their own status repeatedly lowered. For example, in the episode with the boats in the lock, the pride and ignorance of the narrator's crew leads to the most humiliating possible scenario.

With regard to humor, I once noted that two different comic strips in the newspaper both had the story's father be a dentist. It occurred to me that the family of a typical comic strip is rarely poor. They are rarely in true crisis. Dentistry is a safe profession: because the person is acknowledged for his skill in one domain, he has social permission to be otherwise eccentric. No matter how far his status falls, it never jeopardizes his future ability to eat, reproduce, or be an integral part of the community. And his specialty involves actions that are potentially funny on their own: sticking his hands in someone else's mouth.

I once worked in an office where it was very difficult to get fired, and many eccentric people worked there. I would come home and say, "I work in a sit-com." Acting eccentrically was not going to lead to expulsion, and oddity flourished. In that sense, comedy is about acceptance. The dark side of the sit-com scenario is that people can say hurtful things about each other without risk of disownment. It is a common event in a sit-com script to have two people saying insulting things about each other, things which generate laughs in the audience, but which under normal circumstances would generate serious tension between speaker and recipient. In the sit-com, these people are safe from banishment. They are stuck together regardless of how many disparaging things they say to each other.

Some of the aspects of the physical comedian are like those of a small child. And indeed, a safe childhood allows for minor misfortunes. The young protagonist is of low status but trying to climb, and because of clumsiness, is the victim of events that lower status again. The safe environment means that there is no danger that loss of status will result in irreversible harm or expulsion. Parents proudly tell cute stories in which their children suffer harmless and humorous misfortunes.

It has been said that it is very difficult for a Hollywood actor to get an Oscar for a comic role. Oscars tend to go to roles that have gravitas. This supports the idea that humor often takes place in a safe environment, where the stakes are low. Conan O'Brien pointed out that the persona pioneered by Bob Hope and Woody Allen, the blustering lady's-man wannabe, doesn't really get the girl in the end. Or if he does get the girl, she is not the most highly prized girl. Humor, such as in Three Men in a Boat, tells the tale of persons who are part of the successful social group, though they are not at high status positions within that group. Falstaff's side won the war, though thanks to no actions on Falstaff's part.

As for Three Men in a Boat, the three men conform to this model. When the next book, Three Men on the Bummel, opens, two of them are married, but their wives tell them what to do. They are safely within their social class, though thanks to no actions of their own. One could say that stereotype humor in general polices the boundaries between the levels of the social hierarchy, but with an acceptance of levels and their members. Self-deprecating humor signals that you accept you own place in the social structure.

To say that comedy is about acceptance does not give it an entirely positive aspect. There are some situations we should not accept. As I observed above, stereotype humor can have the effect of policing boundaries. One reason why stereotype humor about Blacks is no longer generally tolerable in the United States is that we now view as morally unacceptable the racist codification of social class that existed in America before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. Those jokes are just not funny anymore. Three Men in a Boat skirts the darker side of comedy by being primarily self-deprecating.

ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives. Three Men in a Boat does not use as its theme that human experience is mediated by narrative. It does however take every opportunity in relating the trip down the Thames to digress into yet another humorous vignette. It does not have the quasi-religious attitude that literature will save your soul.

The second point of ELC2: is the narrative a well-told tale? It depends. The overall arc of the text is not carefully crafted, but the vignettes themselves are sometimes of the highest humor value. If you don't mind mild uses of stereotype, it may be the funniest book in the English language for you. If you do dislike such humor, well, then it might not be the book for you.

ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. To enjoy the book, you cannot object too strongly to its attempts to enforce social boundaries through stereotype. You cannot detest a society in which these foolish and foppish young men are tolerated. The book pokes loving fun at the leisure classes, but it does not call for their overthrow. At the end of the Uncle Podger sketch, Podger steps heavily on the charwoman's corns. He is a fool, but there is no question that he should have a charwoman.

ELC3 also allows the book itself to be an indication of a desire to belong to a culturally exclusive group. In this case, the leisure class of English fops is portrayed as a safe environment, inviting the reader to join it or to join those who roll their eyes but accept it.

Nerburn, Kent. Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder. New World Library, 2002.

Originally reviewed in 2007, revised in 2012, also posted to Amazon

You might wonder why this book is in the fiction section of this set of reviews. On its surface, this book appears to be a non-fiction book by a writer who is meticulous about recording precise factual experiences, as an anthropologist or a historian might. It turns out that nothing could be farther from the truth.

This book was selected this year to be the "Common Book" at Winona State University in 2006-2007, where many English classes all read the book, and then the author came and spoke about it. On Tuesday, March 20, 2007, at 1 p.m., Nerburn spoke to a group at WSU about the book. In that talk, he admitted that the basic plot of the book was fiction. When challenged about the fact that the book passes itself off as non-fiction, he said, "What is truth? Is a Van Gogh painting true? This book is true in that way." He said that the book was largely stitched together from the "out-takes" from his project on the Red Lake Reservation, plus conversations and observations on Lakota reservations.

There are several problems with the fact that Nerburn presents the text with all the trappings of a social science observation, while much of the book is fiction. First, he admits that the words he places in the mouths of his characters come largely from the Anishinabe (Ojibway, Chippewa) people, but he puts them in the mouths of Lakota characters. I am told that this is a major faux pas: the two groups have widely divergent group perspectives.

Second, throughout the text, he carefully sprinkles references to turning on and off his tape recorder. The characters emphasize the need for him to get their words and the context of their words right. The characters denigrate white wannabes, who embrace native culture for the wrong reasons: because they have rejected mainstream Western values. The characters are usually cautious about the possibility that whites are going to exploit the native experience for their own purposes, but these same fictional characters acknowledge that he is different, more genuine. While Nerburn claims that many of the words are from the mouths of people who are ethnically American Indian, the plot and the context of those words are fictionalized. His constant references to authenticity can be seen as an attempt to hide his own exploitation of the native experience.

The writer doth protest too much, methinks.

April 2012: I have read over the statement that the author has posted on his website about what he means by the truth of the book. I interpret his explanation to mean that the book is true in a metaphorical sense, even if not all details are factually true. To me, that means that the book is a parable. But the text presents itself as factually true in the details. Image if, in the canonical gospels, Jesus was telling a story about the good Samaritan, and he explained how he had to keep turning the tape recorder off, and how the Samaritan insisted he get the story exactly right. I would have a hard time with that, too.

Ondaatje, Michael. The Cat's Table. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Originally reviewed in 2013

This text first appears to be a sentimental reminiscence of an ocean voyage that the narrator took as a rascally boy from Sri Lanka to Britain in the 1950s. The prose is elegant and spare. The stories well-drawn and lean. For readers looking for an action novel, the tone will be too reflective and detached, too concerned with the play of light on water and with the problems of memory.

From the facts of the author's life, the narrator could very well be the author, though about two-thirds of the way through the book, it gradually develops a plot which seems unlikely to have actually happened. The author in a published interview says that he did take that same trip at about that age, but that he remembers almost nothing about it, and that the story is fiction.

The book at first seems purely episodic, and told from the point of view of a narrator who is now much older. He had been a young boy, who was able to form a gang with two other young boys. They explored the ship, met curious fellow passengers and crew. The center of the book is occupied with the passage of the ship through the Suez Canal.

After that point, the narrator focuses more on the connection of the trip to his present-day life in England and America. We get vignettes about the Sri Lankan community in London, about the death of one of his friends from the boat, about the young life of Miss Lasqueti, one of the passengers, and its potential meaning in the narrator's present adulthood. The Suez Canal is perhaps the passage from innocence to experience.

In the latter half of the book, there appears a somewhat fabulistic story of a girl and her father and their efforts to be reunited and escape, which seems to have a general post-colonial theme. I am not sure I understand the deeper levels of what is going on in this text, but I would be interested in finding a commentary that could illuminate me.

The book has references to Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and other works. Many threads are left open at the conclusion of the tale, and there is no pat happy ending. The attempt of the father and daughter to escape could be seen through a post-colonial lens. One thing this story shows is the inability of the English authorities, as hard as they try, to control the father's fate.

The copy I read was classified as "Young Adult" literature, but this is a children's book in the same way as Huck Finn or Momo, capable of being read by a younger person, with exciting tales in the vignettes of the text, but the overall text seems to hold depths beyond the child's understanding. One might not even want children to read it, as Miss Lasqueti's story obliquely describes sexual exploitation. Some reviews describe this book in comparison to his other works as a clear and straightforward story. In his earlier work, he used challenging form to disrupt the expectations of the reader.

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead : a Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Originally reviewed in 2008

This book is written as though it were a series of letters from a narrator, named John Ames, to his son. Ames had married late in life, and his son is only seven when the narrator is in his seventies, is suffering from a heart condition and is close to death. He wants to communicate his mature ideas to his son when his son reaches maturity, so he writes these letters that he hopes his son will read many years later.

The technique of letters works. The author is able to maintain the credible voice of an older first person throughout. One feels that one is sharing the true inner thoughts of John Ames. It is a plausible conceit that the author actually found the letters.

The narrator is a minister who was born in 1880, in a small town in Iowa near the Kansas border and who is writing the letters in the 1950s. He stays in the small town all his life and dies there. This may sound like a dull premise, but the location is actually full of drama. The narrator's grandfather founded the town as an abolitionist trying to support other abolitionists in Kansas, so the narrator remembers stories of the days of bloody Kansas. The narrator's grandfather and father were both ministers, and the narrative dwells on the issue of war and whether it can ever be justified by Christianity.

The narrator's older brother had gone to 19th century Germany to study, and he returns an atheist, which allows the text to wrestle with believe and doubt. Toward the end of the book, the narrator deals with his god-son, who has committed some sinful acts, has had a rough life, and struggles with acceptance by his father and god-father. So the end of the book examines forgiveness and judgement. As one can see, for letters from nowhere ville Iowa, the book covers a lot of ground.

Although the book deals with a wide variety of issues, it does so from the eyes of a traditionally Protestant minister, so it could be read even by someone who, for religious reasons, only reads "Christian fiction." But that does not mean that it serves up platitudes and easy answers. It can also be enjoyed by someone who has wrestled with faith and rejected it. All in all, well done.

NOTE FROM 2023: My wife recently read Robinson's other novels in this series. This novel is one of an interconnected series. I have not read the other novels. One of the other novels focuses on the god-son, and another focuses on the woman who becomes the much-younger wife of John Ames.

Silber, Joan. Ideas of Heaven: a Ring of Stories. Norton, 2004.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Good collection of stories

This book is written in a style called a ring, which is a collection of stories that link to each other. Typically, these links are characters who make brief appearances in an earlier story then get stories of their own later. For example, a minor character in one story who is mean has his own story where his character is explained in its frustrated context. This genre lies somewhere between a collection of stories and a novel.

Silber manages to weave these various tales together with success. The writing is clear and interesting. The characters are usually well-drawn and complex. Longing and sorrow are not in short supply, as people fail, grow, and mature. This is not a slapstick comedy. If you are in need of sweet regret and transformation, this is a good read. Overall themes include religious yearning and sexual desire.

The book includes stories from 19th century China and Renaissance Europe. I think those distant tales struggle the most to link successfully into the weave of the book's overall structure. They also struggle the most to succeed on their own.

Tursun, Perhat. Backstreets: a Novel from Xinjiang. Columbia University Press, 2022.

Originally reviewed in 2023, posted also to Amazon

I found this book extremely repetitive. I know that the author was influenced by Kafka, but, as was said about Dan Quayle, I was a fan of Franz Kafka, and this author is no Franz Kafka.

I was impressed by the Amazon review that pointed out that the first draft of the book was written long before the current oppression of the Uyghurs by the Han Chinese. The final version was finished in 2015, after the current oppression began. If you eliminate the elements of Han oppression from the book, it is merely a book about a man who is suffering mentally and who is wandering the streets of a city, much as in the novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

A friend of mine who is a mental health professional read this book, and his reaction was that the narrator exhibits classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. The dead ringer is the presence of olfactory hallucinations. He suggested that the symptoms are so clearly defined, chances are good that the author suffered them personally.

Literary critics such as Elif Batuman who have been critical of the Russian oppression of Ukrainians and Georgians and the Han oppression of the Uyghurs have been promoting this novel as a stark parable of oppression. It may be true that this novel is a good metaphor for oppression—that is, that being part of an oppressed group may have parallels to suffering from schizophrenia—but that does not mean that this novel is great literature. I still prefer The Trial by Kafka.

I am not an apologist for the Chinese government, though critics who are using this novel as an indictment of the Chinese might think otherwise.

Bozulich, Richard. The Second Book of Go. Kiseido, 1998.

Originally reviewed in 2006: Good but flawed

This book is largely what it advertises. It gives the reader a taste of openings, a taste of tesuji, a taste of Ko and life and death. The best chapter is for the player who is about 25k, the second chapter on handicapped play. I read this at the correct point in my studies, and I quickly advanced 5 stones. Other mid-kyu players could no longer give me a large handicap.

On the negative, each chapter is short, and it covers the material quickly. Further, the two chapters written by Hunter, while excellent, are too advanced for the rest of the book. I studied them meticulously, only to discover that the situations almost never come up in mid-kyu play.

It is said that the companion exercises are found in the four-book series "Graded Go Problems for Beginners." I heartily agree with that assessment. If you do buy this, and you are just beginning and on your second go book, buy also volume two of "Graded Go Problems." If you are on your sixth Go book, buy volume three and four of "Graded Go Problems." They will help you improve as much or more than this book. The advantage of this book is that it provides the theory behind those problems.

If you are a more advanced player, the Hunter chapters are perhaps worthwhile.

Ishida, Akira. Attack and Defense. Ishi Press, 1980.

Originally reviewed in 2006

Attack and defense is a great book for Go players as a third or fourth book. (First, an explanation of the game for complete beginners; then a book or two of beginning life and death problems.) Even for players who do not read books, but just play, this is an important book. It gives strategic moves and ideas and big picture tactics, rather than small scale, liberty by liberty life and death problems. For players who play too close, winning battles but losing wars, this is an important book.

The thesis of the book is that there is a trade-off between territory and power. Not only is this a critical concept for higher level Go, but it is also an excellent "lesson" that can be applied to other areas of life. If I were teaching a course in Go to business professionals, as some people have done, this is the concept I would try to instill. Profit versus market share. A quick buck or influence. I have read over a dozen Go books, and this is my best.

Kano, Yoshinori. Graded Go Problems for Beginners. Kiseido, 1985.

Originally reviewed in 2006

The Graded Go Problems series is a set of problem drill books that sharpen the Go players skills. Book one starts with complete beginner problems, and each subsequent volume gets harder until volume four deals with problems that challenge players over ten kyu. Bozulich refers to this set as an excellent companion to his work entitled, The Second Book of Go. His book goes rapidly over the general theory of the game, and leaves to this series the hard work of getting the reader to master the details.

With a strategy skill game such as chess or go, one typically makes rapid progress early on, and then one hits a wall, a steep learning curve, to greater improvement. Book one of the series is too easy. A complete beginner with quickly advance beyond those problems. The second book is better. It genuinely begins to advance players into an intermediate level. But it is book three that I found had the most productive level of difficulty. It is the level to which I return for practice in the basics. Book four is a bit too steep on the learning curve for fundamentals drills.

A good book for beginners will give the same sorts of exercises as is found in book one. Book two is useful to read once or twice. But it is book three that is useful to own, for occasional refreshers.

Otake, Hideo. Opening Theory Made Easy: Twenty Strategic Principles to Improve your Opening Game. Kiseido, 2002.

Originally reviewed in 2006

This is different from many other Go books. It is not packed with a lot of details and exercises. Nor is it a book for complete beginners. It is more in the genre of Go proverbs illustrated. Twenty strategic principles in the opening are discussed. There are a few examples, and a few exercises, but the book strives to focus on general principles.

A friend of mine warned me to avoid books on openings. Don't memorize joseki, because then you will lack the flexibility needed when your opponent deviates from the joseki. This book is probably the best book to read to start learning opening theory. It does not bog you down in minutae of joseki. After you have read your first couple of books, especially Ishida's "Attack and defense," then try this book.

Watson, John. Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy: Advances since Nimzowitsch. Gambit, 1998.

Originally reviewed in 2006, revised in 2023: High-level Modern Chess Theory

I am no chess grandmaster, so I cannot comment on whether the theories articulated here are genuinely what is required to attain the highest levels of chess. Nevertheless, I have read many books on chess, and this one impresses me as different from and superior to the others that I have read.

Certainly, there are many fine books for beginners, such as Wolff's Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess. Certainly, there are good intermediate books, such as Vukovic's Art of the Attack in Chess. There are boatloads of books on openings. There are even good intermediate books on chess theory, such as Silman's Reassess your Chess. This book deals with general theory at a high level of skill. It explains the sorts of trade-offs that modern grandmasters make. It shows why chess didn't die after Capablanca, but underwent a renaissance of more subtle calculation.

One problem with chess books in English is the habit of western authors to wish that the Soviet era never existed. Thus, Alekhine and Capablanca are endlessly revived. But the post-World War II school of modern strategy, which was pioneered and developed in the Soviet Union, is often lacking. One can only go so far with Nimzovitch and Hans Kmoch. Watson pulls back the curtain on strategies that seem to violate the old rules of the early 20th century. I cannot say that I fully understand his ideas or am able to implement them, but they are intriguing, nonetheless.

That having been said, this book, written just before computers surpassed humans at chess, does not contain ideas that have been learned from modern chess software. I know that the game of Go has changed after AlphaGo put the humans in the back seat, and I imagine similar changes have happened in chess.

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Originally reviewed in 20??

Review here.