"Enlightenment Now" is an arrogant title? It sounds remarkably generic to me.

Anyways, that cuts both ways. If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.

The subtitle is "the case for reason, science, humanism and progress".

>If I believed that the book was going to be overwrought twaddle and then saw this review while deciding if it was worth my time, I'd be just as likely to dismiss them both as haughty wankers not worth listening to.

I guess you're not as big a fan of reason as Pinker is, then. It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.

In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia. You can easily find similarly snarky articles by Pinker himself.

>In any case, the style of the review is pretty much par for the course in academia.

A bit off topic, but that's terribly damning of academia! It's not often you get a concrete example of the "educated elite talking down to the proles" stereotype, but that review is it, in the flesh.

It's off-putting. Viscerally so. I've read bad restaurant reviews by professional critics that are less venomous.

That's weird. I don't get that impression from the review at all. Pinker is a Harvard Professor, and hardly a prole from anyone's point of view. You have to bear in mind that Pinker has put out a series of publications in the past 5-10 years that are extremely patronizing to scholars in the humanities. If you're going to tell entire disciplines that they're doing it all wrong, and that you know how to do it right, then you can't really expect a friendly response. One can imagine the reaction if, for example, historians wrote articles telling physicists how to conduct their research.

So is the review directed at the author, or the potential reader?

> It's the content of the review you need to look at if you want to figure out whether the book's any good or not.

True. Doesn't mean it's worth his time to read if the style is distracting. He's just hoping to find a better-written review.

Perhaps generic for the kinds of books Oprah endorses, but given the reviewer's demonstration of Pinker's ignorance, is a laughably pretentious title.