Reading

Book review:Connected

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-29 09:46

By Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, published by Little, Brown & Company

For those of us not actively toiling in a university, most modern writing in the social sciences can be placed into one of three categories.

The first category, which is vast, consists of the arcane and the incremental - those studies so obscure, or which advance scholarship so infinitesimally, that they can be safely ignored by the general reader. (Not that this work isn't important; it keeps academic publishing in business, and significant knowledge accretes in tiny drips on the way to tenure.)

The second category consists of statistical proof of the obvious. (Some actual study findings published recently: "the parent-child relationship ... commonly includes feelings of irritation, tension and ambivalence"; women are more likely to engage in casual sex with "an exceptionally attractive man"; and driving while text-messaging leads to "a substantial increase in the risk of being involved in a safety-critical event such as a crash." Thank you, social science!)

And in the third category, which is surely the smallest, are works of brilliant originality that stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we understand the world. But here's a funny thing: Some research, defying logic, manages to straddle the boundary between the second category and the third, seeming alternately (or is it simultaneously?) obvious and brilliant.