What’s a book reviewer to do when one of his favorite writers – Steven Pinker, a great explainer of tough concepts in many different fields – produces a book that’s a snoozefest? Three things: (1) remind readers of Pinker’s better writing and thinking in other works; (2) indicate my reservations about his latest book, and (3) summarize the book anyway, because it contains quite a few nuggets of wisdom, although those could have been conveyed in a much shorter tome.
That is what I will do in this review of Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. First, I’ll explain the goofy title. Then, I’ll touch on themes that the book raises, including a distant connection – that may exist only in my imagination – to money management firms and Thomas Pynchon’s classic 1966 seriocomic novel of paranoia, The Crying of Lot 49.
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