The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020) by celebrityprofessor Michael J. Sandel presents weighty arguments for wholesale improvements ofAmerican society. Though the title is misleading (see below), this is a smart, insightfulbook. The author provides fact-based diagnoses of the growing inequality between ourhighly educated leadership and professional castes and the hoi […]
Category: Reviews
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern WorldBy Adrian WooldridgeNew York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2021. 482 pages. In this smart book, British journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge makes acompelling case that the turn to (limited) meritocracy was the key to most of thesignificant advances and achievements of our modern world. He explains how meritocracycame […]
Review: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (1935) Say It Ain’t So, Jo, Say It Ain’t So! My Dear Ms. Walton, Though epistolary convention calls for declarations of true love to come in the valediction, I humbly beg your ladyship’s pardon for announcing it right here at the beginning: Jo, je t’aime! I love thee for conceiving of […]
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (2015) merits hyperbolic kudos, methinketh. (The author’s website is sydneypadua.com.) This graphic novel presents a fun and funny account of inventive 19th-century number-crunchers Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who are considered by some the first computer scientists, and their Promethean attempts — ultimately unsuccessful — to construct a functioning, programmable Difference Engine. They were about a century ahead of their time.
Michael A. Winkelman
Reader in Imaginary Books, Unseen University
17 November 2015
Review: Dawn Ius, Anne & Henry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2015)
That Bodgy Boleyn Girl; or, We Will Sometimes Be Royal
For Charles Beem, the king of queens
Rex quondam rexque futurus! Once again the Tudors rule. We have of late witnessed a veritable onslaught of books, movies, and other popular media devoted to the dynasty that reigned over England from 1485 to 1603, whilst scholarly attention to the period hath also continued unabated. The twin poles of this feverish interest have been King Henry VIII, he of the six wives, and his daughter Elizabeth I, the never-married Virgin Queen. Perhaps the most unexpected and bizarre contribution to this crowded field is the young adult novel Anne & Henry by Dawn Ius. In this story, Henry Tudor, who is Mr. Popular at a private high school in a posh suburb of Seattle, Washington, finds himself inconveniently attracted to the new bad girl in town, one Anne Boleyn. The central couple narrate events in alternating chapters, starting with Henry and ending with Anne. In some ways it’s an intriguing premise – what if?! – but unfortunately this book is not very good at all. Myriad examples of excellent, creative YA fiction abound, many based on history, but this is not one of them.
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Review by Michael A. Winkelman
Richard Doyle. Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere. In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2011. 358 pp. $35 paperback, $70 hardcover.
Wrong. He was so wrong! —Cady Heron in “Mean Girls”
Judging Darwin’s Pharmacy by its cover produces a positive initial impression. The image from the nineteenth-century painting In Fairyland is quite fitting; additionally, it is cleverly apt because it is by the Victorian artist also named Richard Doyle. Cracking the book open and reading it, however, is like experiencing a really long, bad trip. Days after putting it down, this reviewer still Read more “Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere”
Michael A. Winkelman
February 7, 2012
Dangerous Persuasions
I’m not sure a correspondence with you is something a woman of honour could permit herself. —Madame de Tourvel, to Vicomte de Valmont
Formidable! Is “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988) the best costume drama ever? Yes or no, it presents an amazing fictional demonstration—almost a primer or casebook study—of what cognitive scientists and primatologists call “Machiavellian Intelligence.” In brief, that is the idea that Read more “Dangerous Persuasions”
Book Review by Michael A. Winkelman
April 17, 2005
I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (FSG, 2004)
So what’s happening on campus these days? Many people have turned to Tom Wolfe’s bestselling I Am Charlotte Simmons to find out. The picture Wolfe paints isn’t pretty, but the poor quality of the novel itself dampens his disparagement significantly. Slogging through Wolfe’s magnum opus on contemporary college life turns out to be a trying experience for all but the least discriminating reader. This reviewer finds the subject matter, academia, almost endlessly Read more “I Am Charlotte Simmons”
for Evolutionary Psychology
A Review of William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2007. $39.95, 252 pp., ISBN 978-0-674-02631-5.
by Michael A. Winkelman, Department of English, Bowling Green State University, Ohio.
Comeuppance by William Flesch seeks to explain some important aspects of fiction in light of insights from theoretical biology. Flesch proposes that humans enjoy stories because they tend to showcase altruistic behavior, something that certainly exists but whose high costs make it unexpected or difficult to rationalize. Put another way, though individuals possess selfish genes, which accounts for nepotism or parental sacrifices, they also exhibit a natural disposition to Read more “Whence Poetic Justice?”