Word: gould
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Barnum is one of the more honest characters in Jacobs' conflation of fact and fiction. In effect, the legendary showman leads a kind of geek chorus of real and imagined religious zealots, yellow journalists, gangsters and robber barons. The Wall Street rogue Jay Gould actually sells someone a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge. A Jewish peddler leaves the fold to become a dowser for parched anti-Semites. Hull changes the name of a new cigar from Pickaninny to Uncle Tom after hearing that black smokers might be offended...
Pinker has little patience with critics, particularly Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who accuses evolutionary psychologists in general (and presumably Pinker as well) of indulging a "penchant for narrow and often barren speculation" and "pure guesswork in the cocktail-party mode." Pinker has even less patience with those who would confuse an evolutionary explanation for how the human mind evolved with the idea that our fate is genetically predetermined. Genes, he says, "do not dictate what we should accept or how we should live...
Ostwald sustains that fine balance between objectivity and intimacy throughout the book, as he explores Gould's growing torment and his sad decline. Ostwald's abiding concern for his often exasperating friend, whom he was never able to induce to seek therapy, makes this superb psychological study also a poignant personal memoir...
...epilogue picks up on the story line of an autistic "subject" mentioned in Chapter Two. This person turns out to be the author's son, as Gould reveals in the last sentence of the book. Gould's loving account of his son's day-date calculating abilities is touching and tender, but does seem somewhat misplaced in this book on the millennium that could do with a binding conclusion...
...short, the questions Gould poses about the millennium are usually far more interesting than the answers. Instead of dealing with contemporary psychological and cultural reasons behind the millennial obsession-say, that New Year's Day 2000 may well become the next big conversation opener and common experience of our lifetimes, a Kennedy assassination equivalent for Generation X-Gould approaches the topic from a dry, historical perspective. The result is an eclectic combination of facts, history lecture, and 11th grade math project: an admittedly brilliant big-name scholar's erudition-on-parade...