Opening Chapter Research Articles

Zagaku

Zagaku

World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century by Xin Fan

Reviewed by: World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century by Xin Fan Ke Ren Xin Fan. World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 251 pp. Hardcover ($99.99) or e-book. The study of the politics and intellectual stakes of historical production has long been an important subfield in modern China studies. Xin Fan’s World History and National Identity in China is a valuable and unique addition to this literature. On the one hand, it shares the approach of recent studies in focusing not only on the politics of historical writing but also on the structural changes in the education system, the formation of academic disciplines, and the rise of modern print culture.1 On the other hand, this book spans the entire twentieth century and places its emphasis not on the historiography of China but on the development of world history (世界史 shijie shi) as an academic field from the late Qing to contemporary China. Furthermore, in using sources such as autobiographies, correspondence, and, importantly, archived personnel files and declassified secret reports, it sheds empathetic light on the “agency of non-Western world historians in writing history based on the lived experiences of some of the most significant Chinese world historians” (10). In the opening chapter, Fan locates the origins of modern Chinese world-historical writing in the late Qing, connecting long-standing Neo-Confucian and statecraft interests in compiling geographical knowledge of foreign realms to recent changes in the New Policies period under a reformed education system. This shift is evidenced in the work of Zhou Weihan (周维翰 1870–1910), a Changzhou scholar and physician, whose An Outline of Western History (西史綱目 Xishi gangmu), published in 1901 through the translation-oriented Shanghai press Jingshi wenshe (經世文社), represented a new temporally focused approach to world history. Instead of idealizing past epochs such as the Three Dynasties period like many other late Qing intellectuals, Zhou applied universal categories to his comparative analysis of ancient European and Chinese societies, while he held onto Confucian notions such as human nature (性 xing) in an “attempt to embrace the belief in a common humanity in overcoming the differences between the East and West” (48). For Fan, Zhou’s seemingly cosmopolitan approach would serve as both a standard and a challenge for later generations of Chinese scholars whose study of world history proceeded under vastly different professional and political circumstances. Professionalization, print capitalism, and the shifting priorities of Republican and wartime China serve as the context of chapter 2. Here, Fan focuses on Western-educated “returned students” who became university professors and practicing world historians. Although Chen Hengzhe (陳衡哲 1893–1976), who was notably the only renowned woman [End Page E-28] historian in China during this period, used her writings on European history in the 1920s to argue for the need to embrace liberal internationalism as an antidote to imperialism, her US-trained peers would turn to cultural nationalism as they became engulfed in the cultural debates and wartime exigencies of the 1930s and 1940s. The exemplary figure here is Lei Haizong (雷海宗 1902–1962), who offered sustained critiques of Eurocentric “world history” and periodization as practiced by Western scholars and developed a “cultures/civilizations” schema to write the history of different world regions. Lei’s culturalist approach embodied the conservative stance taken by intellectuals associated with the wartime Zhanguo ce (戰國策) clique, who sought nationalist solutions to China’s revival through historical analogies between their own time and the Warring States period. If the demands of nationalism influenced many Chinese scholars in the 1940s, it was Marxism and the structural transformation of academic institutions that reshaped the practice of world history in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chapter 3 traces these developments through the establishment of “teaching and research units” (教研室 jiaoyanshi), the shift to Russian sources and textbooks, and the Soviet-style training of a new generation of world historians in an important Ancient World History Seminar in Changchun. While some world historians had trouble adapting to the political and institutional changes, others still tried to carve out spaces of autonomy even as they worked within imposed categories. Chapter 4 examines this dynamic...

“A Different Kind of Meaning Is Exposed”

“A Different Kind of Meaning Is Exposed”

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture

Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir: What Television Series Tell Us about World Politics

Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir: What Television Series Tell Us about World Politics

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass

Reviewed by: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace by Sean Grass David Vincent (bio) The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass; pp. xi + 279. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Sean Grass's The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace has an unusual structure. Following an introduction setting out the nature of the enterprise, the first chapter—which comprises more than a quarter of the book—is essentially a bibliographical exercise seeking to demonstrate that, from 1820 onward, the genre of autobiography was a major driver in the growth of Victorian publishing and reached a peak in the 1850s and 1860s. Making rigorous use of the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue and other bibliographical collections, along with a range of publishers' archives, Grass provides the most thorough statistical survey of the field. The analysis, which centers on graphs that show "Increases of 'autobiography' titles, 1841–1860," (24) "Autobiographical titles by year 1841–1869," (26) and "Titles [autobiographical and all] published by decade 1800–1860," (27) will comprise an essential point of reference for all future work on published nonfiction memoirs in the period as well as the broader dynamics of Victorian book history. This first chapter supplies fascinating detail on the range of autobiographies published in this period. However, the focus is not on the texts themselves but rather on the commercial enterprise of publishing. The basic point is that an increasing range of firms commissioned autobiographies because there was a growing market for them. They sought out narrative accounts of unfolding lives in order to make money. By this means, identity became a commodity, supported by the Victorian publishing industry and contingent developments in mass literacy, retail outlets, circulating libraries, and copyright law. These changes are linked to parallel developments in the bureaucratization of identity through the creation of the General Record Office in 1836, and other transitions from community to official constructions of personal identity. [End Page 474] At this juncture, the analysis moves away from nonfiction autobiography and its particular claims to truth. The remainder of the book focuses on the commodification of identity through separate chapters on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) together with Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863), and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). The final chapter revisits the drama of The Tichborne Claimant, which Grass describes as "a stunning parable of modern subjectivity" (213). Only the first of the texts takes the form of a fictional autobiography. The remainder move further away from the literary form which is examined at the outset, focusing instead on the convergence of textuality and commodity in the construction of identity, and the anxieties that this generated. There is a price to be paid for this change of focus. It would have been instructive for Grass to turn back to the classic Victorian autobiographies, armed with his new understanding of the dynamics of the genre. Likewise, the insistence on the interface between identity and the market could have been interrogated by an examination of the many memoirs in this period which were published in noncommercial outlets such as newspapers, or in journals connected to organizations and interests, or which remained in manuscript form, intended only as a private record for the author and perhaps his or her family. Those issues must be saved for another book, however. The conclusion of the opening chapter is that the 1860s represented a watershed in literary representations of the nature of identity, thus enabling Grass to make powerful connections between a set of novels which appeared in these years. The discussion of each in turn both draws from and interrogates a wide range of scholarship on a set of texts which, with the possible exception of Reade's Hard Cash, have already received substantial critical attention. In each case Grass is at pains to deconstruct any sense of the novels reaching a conclusion that satisfactorily reconstitutes...

“So Natural Is the Union of Religion with Justice”: Hooker’s Defense of Religious Establishment

One of the greatest contributions of Anglican theology has been its consistent defense of the value of public religious establishment, and the classic defense remains that of Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1600). In the opening chapters of Book V of the Laws, Hooker offers a compelling argument that religion is a crucial support to a well-ordered and virtuous polity while seeking to forestall the objection that this “instrumentalizes” religion to merely political ends. He also acknowledges the generic value of any kind of public reli- gion while nonetheless contending that the wise ruler must choose that religion that is true, namely, Christianity. Hooker’s defense of religious establishment remains relevant in a Western world coming to terms with the contradictions of secular pluralism. KEYWORDS: Anglicanism, religious establishment, public religion, Richard Hooker, civic virtue, justice

Ethnogenesis and Stranger-Kings in Old Scandinavian Literature

Ethnogenesis and Stranger-Kings in Old Scandinavian Literature

On Transcultural Presence and Reparative Reading Practice: Rethinking Belonging and Transcultural Transformation in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract I offer a reading of the opening chapter of Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) through Bill Ashcroft’s approach to “transcultural presence.” I argue that Alvarez’s opening chapter casts the experience of transcultural presence as a complex and conflicted emotional space that challenges the reader’s appreciation of belonging beyond received interpretative frameworks. I further draw on Sten Pulz Moslund’s theoretical engagement with the “presencing” of place through a “topopoetic mode of reading.” I propose that the presencing of place in the opening chapter of Alvarez’s novel encourages a located, embodied way of reading transformative moments of transcultural presence. Finally, I suggest that Alvarez’s ethics of postcolonial, transcultural writing encourages what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to as “reparative reading.” “Reparative reading” is illustrated in terms of the literary text’s opening up toward the “volume” of transcultural complexity, an opening up that calls for self-reflexive interpretative caution and care for locative particularity when engaging with transcultural literature.

City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950 by Michael Lasser

Reviewed by: City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950 by Michael Lasser David H. Miller City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950. By Michael Lasser. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. [xi, 303 p. ISBN 9781580469524 (hardcover), $34.95; ISBN 9781787444638 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations. In City Songs and American Life, 1900– 1950, Michael Lasser sets out to document how American cityscapes “spring to life” in the popular songs of the first half of the twentieth century. “My chapter on Broadway,” Lasser explains in the book’s opening pages, “isn’t about the great musicals . . . but rather about the ways songs portrayed the street, itself” (p. ix). Many of the protagonists in these songs, he later argues, are bound together by “urban sensibility . . . an outlook and a way of speaking that comes from living in a city” (pp. 16–17). This topic is appealing, since it encompasses not only many of the most prominent events and trends of the era, from the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression to flappers and Prohibition, but also many of the most familiar and beloved songs, from “I Get a Kick out of You” and “As Time Goes By” to “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “St. Louis Blues.” With tunes like these at its center, City Songs would seem destined to find a wide audience. And yet it is difficult to say who this book’s intended audience is. Though it is published by a university press, contains endnotes, and makes occasional reference to academic literature, it is definitely not aimed at academics. Lasser’s engagement with secondary sources is fleeting and at the surface level, usually consisting of nothing more than a one-sentence summary of an author’s work. What’s more, City Songs lacks an index, thus severely limiting the scholarly utility of a book filled to the brim with the names of people, places, and songs. One might presume, then, that Lasser wrote City Songs with a more general audience of music lovers in mind, but in this context, too, it is an awkward fit. While it is not especially long (280 pages of main text), it is dense and rambling. Lasser’s writing style consists of a mélange of references to historical figures famous and obscure, endless song lyrics, and obtuse philosophical musings. “You never quite get away from New York,” begins one paragraph (p. 22); “Songs are among the most conservative of the arts,” Lasser proclaims out of nowhere (p. 27). There are, furthermore, no main characters from whose perspective a reader might more easily follow the story. Figures such as Irving Berlin and Ma Rainey take center [End Page 72] stage for a few paragraphs only to disappear from the narrative as suddenly as they emerged. All but the most dedicated devotees are liable to find this approach disorienting. Most confounding, City Songs contains few images (typically no more than two per chapter) and exactly zero audio clips. Yes, it is a book, but I was surprised to learn that it did not come with an accompanying website or at least a link to a curated YouTube or Spotify playlist. In the “Notes to the Reader,” Lasser blames this situation on copyright restrictions: If I could, I would put all of them [the songs discussed in the book] on a giant CD to hand you when you open the book, or, even better, I’d loosen the copyright laws so an author could quote more liberally from songs written after 1922. Neither is going to happen, so that takes me back to the need for adjectives, a lot of adjectives. Their task is to bring you closer to the songs. (p. ix) Closer, perhaps, but not close enough. Lasser writes with a palpable enthusiasm for the music he discusses, but I found it difficult to match that enthusiasm in cases in which I was not already familiar with the songs in question. I soon tired, additionally, of toggling back and forth bet ween the book and my computer in an effort to hear what Lasser was hearing. In the opening chapter, Lasser recounts how a radio show on the Great American Songbook that he hosted...

Empire City: A Novel by Matt Gallagher

Reviewed by: Empire City: A Novel by Matt Gallagher Caleb S. Cage (bio) empire city: a novel Matt Gallagher Atria Books https://catalog.simonandschuster.com/TitleDetails/TitleDetails.aspx?cid=1318&isbn=9781501177804&FilterByName=&FilterBy=&FilterVal=&ob=0&pn=1&ed=&showcart=N&camefrom=&find=empire%20city&a= 368 pages; Print, $17.00 Empire City, Matt Gallagher's 2020 novel, is a complex literary work. It tests literary boundaries by being both an alternative history of the United States around the turn of the twenty-first century and also a work of science fiction with characters with superhuman powers. It is a rich and timely social commentary on contemporary America, and it is also an extraordinary literary achievement. Empire City could hold its own in any one of these categories, but Gallagher's daring effort to combine them makes it a remarkable, important, and prescient work. Empire City is set in New York City, here renamed the Empire City, America's first city-state. The establishment of the first city-state is not just due to taxes, as Gallagher puts it simply, but due to an entire chain of alternative events, which he signals throughout the opening chapters. In this America, the American flag has sixty stars and thirteen stripes, a Rockefeller has served as president, there is a Nixon memorial and Westmoreland Plaza, and Tupac is alive and a reality television star. There are countless others, of course, all ranging from mundane to monumental. What is central to the America of Gallagher's novel, though, is that it primarily identifies as the eventual victors of a drawn-out Vietnam War and little else. In this America there is a vibrant warrior class made up of 3 percent of the population, a group that is venerated and valorized for fighting the nation's wars. These warriors, all volunteers and immigrants seeking citizenship, are also venerated for providing examples of duty, meaning, and sacrifice to the broader civilian population, which is mostly engaged in economic life not terribly different from that of the real twenty-first-century America. [End Page 19] Although Gallagher makes it clear that winning the Vietnam War is absolutely central to the national identity, it is almost as clear that the country learned almost all of the wrong lessons from that victory. In the aftermath of that victory, the America of Empire City turned its focus entirely inward, though hardly isolationist. It learned that counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations could successfully defeat guerrilla armies, and it practiced that lesson in countless places around the globe. That is, other countries are mentioned in Empire City only as locations of American occupations and wars, not as sovereign nations with interests, complex local politics, or even as the home to innocent civilians. All of this creates a strange new American exceptionalism for Gallagher's readers to consider. On the one hand, the America of Empire City is economically powerful, militarily ambitious, and unbothered by, even unaware of, the sincere grievances of the people and nations it encounters through the exercise of its power. On the other hand, it has outsourced all of its global adventurism to mercenaries from a small percentage of the population, so much so that the average American can only revere the military service and avoid any of the gruesome details. As Gallagher's narrator puts it: "There were three ways to tell war stories to twenty-first-century Americans: brave, sad, violent. All needed to be clean as a bone. Anything else was too much." An intense political drama plays out within the world Gallagher creates, a drama that reflects all of the social and cultural illnesses and neuroses of such a world. The America of Empire City is divided, even within the warrior class, even as many of the important institutions and freedoms still basically hold. That is, Empire City is dystopian, though not as thoroughgoing as 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale. There are still political prizes to attain, there is still power to exert, and the citizens still have some say in how that happens. This provides a fascinating foundation for the novel's plot, a plot that is only enhanced by Gallagher's decision...

Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel

Reviewed by: Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel Marianne Stecher-Hansen (bio) Children's Literature in the Nordic World. By Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel. Aarhus University Press and University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Children's Literature in the Nordic World serves as a concise introduction to children's reading cultures in the Nordic countries and demonstrates a significant evolution in reading practices, genres, and educational circumstances over the past 250 years. The book is co-authored by scholars at Aarhus University, Denmark: Nina Christensen, professor of children's literature and head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media, and Charlotte Appel, professor of early modern cultural history. The work is published in the University of Wisconsin's small-book Nordic World series, as a co-publication with the Aarhus University Press; the series seeks to feature top thinkers in the Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland—in order to explore the region's history, culture, and values. Although the title Children's Literature in the Nordic World might suggest content from the entire Nordic region, which would include Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) as well as Finland, Iceland and Greenland, the study rests primarily on Denmark as "the main example" (7), making use of Danish children's books and Danish writers as case studies. That said, there are interspersed texts and examples from Norway (notably, that country was part of the Danish realm until 1814) as well as from [End Page 345] Sweden and Swedish-Finland mentioned in the study. In making use of the term children's literature, the title might also seem to suggest the analysis of literary texts for children; however, the study avoids close readings of the selected texts and media, instead focusing on the institutions, national policies, reading practices, and socio-economic circumstances that shaped the reading cultures of Nordic (i.e. mainly Danish) children. Christensen and Appel include precise descriptions of the material culture of children's literature and include a wide variety of texts, genres, and other media. The book includes good quality, color illustrations that accompany each chapter. The narrative is organized into six short chapters, each framed by the evolving conceptions of childhood in Scandinavia, from the Enlightenment to the present. The content of each chapter is illuminated by the legal, educational, and socio-economic developments in Scandinavian societies which determined children's reading practices, their access to books and materials, and their agency as citizens. The authors' approach involves opening each chapter with individual case studies that describe the reading practices and environments of two or three individual children (historical personages) of the respective eras, who are carefully selected to illustrate socio-economic and gender differences. In the opening three chapters, "Introduction," "Educating Young Hearts and Minds, 1750-1820" and " The Child as a Future Patriotic Citizen, 1820-1900," the authors illuminate the romantic concept of childhood which emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment and, subsequently, inspired the development of children's literature as a distinct genre (particularly via the popularized folk fairy tale) during the nineteenth century. In the opening chapter which explores the period 1750 to 1820, the humble childhood of the celebrated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the son of an itinerate shoemaker, is effectively contrasted with that of the lesser-known Danish-German writer Friederike Bruun (1765-1835), a product of upper-class birth and private education. Scholars who are seeking a deeper discussion of H. C. Andersen's profound contribution as a radical innovator of children's literature via the fairy tale genre may be disappointed by this cursory treatment of his legacy, especially given that Andersen may be credited as the first modern writer to give voice and validation to the experiential world of the child. Nonetheless, the study does a fine job at painting a historical picture of children (such as young Andersen) as readers who were shaped and often limited by specific socioeconomic and material circumstances. Whereas the first half of the study delineates the gradual emergence of children as a new reading public and books for children as a distinct genre, the last three chapters depict a Nordic...

Reading Readers Reading: A Brief Reply to my Interlocutors

Reading Readers Reading: A Brief Reply to my Interlocutors

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te Velde

Reviewed by: Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science by Rudi A. te Velde O.P. Philip-Neri Reese VELDE, Rudi A. te. Metaphysics between Experience and Transcendence: Thomas Aquinas on Metaphysics as a Science. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2021. vii + 246 pp. 38,00€ In the opening chapter of Metaphysics 4, Aristotle states not only that there is a science of being as being and its per se properties but also that it is the task of the metaphysician to investigate the principles and causes of such being. Does this mean that metaphysics comes in two parts—namely, an ontology that investigates being and its properties, followed by a theology that investigates the first principle of being? Or does it mean that the very investigation into being and its properties involves an investigation into the first principle of being—that is, that ontology in some sense is theology? The central purpose of Rudi A. te Velde's newest book is to show that, at least for Thomas Aquinas and those who would follow him, the answer is emphatically the latter: Thomistic metaphysics is essentially the resolutio, or tracing-back, of common being (ens commune) to divine being (ens divinum). This process of resolution situates Aquinas's metaphysics "between experience and transcendence." Unlike natural philosophy, metaphysics is not focused on reality as it is given to us in and through sensory experience. Unlike Christian theology, metaphysics is not focused on God as revealed to us in and through supernatural faith. Rather, it is focused on what both of these—experience and transcendence—presuppose, namely, the fundamental truth that all of reality comes from, and points back to, God as its principle and source. For te Velde, Aquinas's metaphysics is etiology or, as he puts it, "the science of presuppositions." Chapter 1 offers the reader a synoptic view of the basic outlines and contours of Aquinas's metaphysics, both positively and negatively. Positively, te Velde points out that Aquinas understands metaphysics to be an Aristotelian science, that is, a discipline unified around its subject. For the properties of a subject are what we aim to demonstrate when we engage in Aristotelian science, and its principles are what we appeal to when doing so. Negatively, te Velde contrasts Aquinas's view of metaphysics with that of his contemporary, Siger of Brabant, and that of our contemporary, John Haldane. Unlike the former, Aquinas's metaphysics takes common being, which is participated and created (and so does not include God), as its subject. Unlike the latter, Aquinas's [End Page 162] metaphysics is unified by the intelligibility of being in light of its principles. In chapters 2 through 5, te Velde focuses in on particular themes that are of central importance to Aquinas's account of metaphysics. Chapter 2 examines the role of separatio in distinguishing metaphysics from physics and mathematics. Where physics considers things that require matter both to be and to be understood, and mathematics considers things that require matter to be but not to be understood, metaphysics considers things that require matter neither to be nor to be understood. It does so by means of a judgment of separation—a judgment that something (for example, substance, form, and so on) can be without matter. Chapter 3 turns to the topic of resolutio, wherein the mind moves "from the concrete particular to its intelligible ground." Aquinas's metaphysics is marked by a twofold resolution: one in which being and its attributes are grasped as the intrinsic principles of all things, and a second in which God and separate substances are grasped as the extrinsic principles of all things. Chapter 4 then investigates the notion of transcendentality, which arises in the first of those two resolutive processes—for insofar as being and its attributes are common to all things, they are not limited to just one of the ten categories (that is, they are transcendental). Nevertheless, the way in which predicates like "one," "true," and "good" cut across the categories that divide common being is different from the way that they cut across the divide between God and creatures. This difference ushers in chapter 5's discussion...

Kinship, Migration, and the Chinese American Immigrant Family Narrative

AbstractThe Asian American immigrant family narrative has been extensively discussed in relation to white domesticity and assimilation by critics who emphasize the unique conditions of Asian racialization in North America. Departing from this approach, this essay considers how the immigrant family narrative depicts kinship structures that were instrumental in sustaining the lifeworld of Chinese migrants during and in the aftermath of the exclusion period (1882–1943). Drawing on theories of racial capitalism, I argue that the appropriation of pre-existing kinship structures played a crucial role in the exploitation of Chinese migrants by sustaining a transnational remittance economy that tied migrants to their locations of origin. Through an extended reading of the opening chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), I trace how the text depicts the communal and intimate consequences of this social structure. Kingston’s detailed knowledge of migrant kinship relations stands in contrast with her professed confusion about Chinese culture and identity, a tension that underscores the text’s combination of speculative narrative and historical realism.… the immigrant family narrative conveys the global operations of capital even if, or more precisely because, it subordinates depictions of recognizably “economic” tropes—labor, wages, remittances, and so on—to the ostensibly private realm of family relations.

Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis

We thought the opening chapters of Emily Willingham’s Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis were superb. Willingham demonstrates how to critique a scientific paper for underlying bias: What questions are being asked, and in what ways do a study’s design sway the likelihood of reaching different conclusions? These critical thinking skills are invaluable for students first learning to read research literature. Sometimes data are more ambiguous than students would expect from the way science is covered in the popular press; sometimes authors’ conclusions aren’t really supported by the data. (Willingham draws on a traditional boogeyman—low-sample-size evolutionary psychology studies—for examples of the latter.)Then Willingham provides a lucid portrait of evolution in action. Readers are likely to gain a great understanding of convergent and divergent evolution, as well as the sorts of environments that are most likely to give rise to each.These are essential concepts for biology students to master. The opening chapters would make for an excellent teaching tool. For older readers students, mind you. Kirstin most certainly won’t recommend Phallacy to her high schoolers, because—as you’d predict from a book titled Phallacy that sports a delightfully suggestive pink squid on its cover—Willingham works through all this material from the attention-grabbing standpoint of sexual behavior, discussing in detail the genitalia and reproductive habits of both human and nonhuman animals. All of it seems like a great way to keep the attention of learners who are ready for the material, but not everyone will be.The latter chapters are also interesting, but in a different way: Willingham presents a whole smorgasbord of fun animal facts. On every page, readers will encounter unexpected trivia: our world is a fascinating place, and evolution has produced an incredible array of different body morphs and behaviors.But, unlike in the opening chapters, there’s not a decisive intellectual framework scaffolding all these facts together. The central argument is that we shouldn’t base our ethical decisions on the behaviors of other animals (a fallacy Willingham terms “the Lobster Trap”), because each species has confronted very different evolutionary pressures. Even if physical bulk and aggression has led to greater mate access among lobsters—or even if this held true among our own ancestors—that doesn’t have much bearing on the ways that we humans ought to structure our interpersonal relationships today. Quite true, but readers should be aware that some hundred pages of trivia will be provided in support of this message. It’s excellent fodder for conversation, but not so necessary from an educational standpoint.All of this is to say the first half of Phallacy seems great for more mature learners, and the second half seems great for people who like to interject remarks like “Did you know that the orange mud crab copulates for six hours after days of devoted courtship?” into their dinner party conversations.There’s some risqué wordplay here, but nothing likely to shock someone who has chosen to read a book entirely about penis evolution. More alarming might be the puns. Kirstin is a card-carrying member of team “Most Puns Are Good Puns,” but others (e.g., Frank) might find themselves groaning. It’s also worth noting that the author has a pronounced political bent that’s readily apparent from the very beginning of the book. We don’t think anyone is likely to distrust an author for invoking Jeffrey Epstein as a villain, but there are also brief negative references to Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump that, unfortunately, might make some readers less likely to absorb Willingham’s excellent analyses. Kirstin has definitely seen students shut down when they feel stereotype threat, including over their political beliefs.All in all, we had great fun reading Phallacy—just don’t let yourself be tricked by the book’s subtitle (Life Lessons from the Animal Penis), since the main message here is that all the odd quirks of evolution can’t tell us how to live our lives.

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Essays in Narrative and Fictionality: Reassessing Nine Central Concepts

Costa Rica (1821–2021): De la independencia a su bicentenario

Costa Rica (1821–2021): De la independencia a su bicentenario

Review: Women and Weapons in the Viking World: Amazons of the North, by Leszek Gardeła

Review: <i>Women and Weapons in the Viking World: Amazons of the North</i>, by Leszek Gardeła