The Island of Doubt

Something is very wrong at Amazon.com. Maybe whoever programs the software that matches purchase patterns with new releases has a strange sense of humor, but the recommendation that showed up in my email box this morning suggests remedial action is in order.

A couple of years ago, I bought, from Amazon, a copy of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything for my father-in-law. This may have been a mistake, as my father-in-law hasn't been in the greatest shape since then. (One could argue that he's in great shape for someone on the far side of 80, but things certainly did start to go downhill after I gave him the book.)

I hadn't read it at the time, and although I consider Bryson one of the worst travel writers in the genre, his history of the English language, The Mother Tongue, was excellent, and I assumed he'd do an acceptable job with an omnibus science survey. As I discovered a while back after finally getting around to reading ASHoNE thanks to my brother's assumption I would enjoy it, I realized what a horrible misjudgment I had made.

Bryson's necessarily arbitrary selection of scientific advances was bad enough, but I fear his baffling success as a travel writer -- ranging from the irresponsible and unfunny A Walk in the Woods, in which he litters his way up the Appalachian Trail, to the offensive and even less humorous Neither Here Nor There, in which no foreigner lives up to his narrow definitions of hospitable or intelligent -- served as his inspirational model for science journalism. Instead of explaining the science, he devotes countless paragraphs to irrelevant character assassination and non-sequiturs. It's as if an attention-deficit-addled teenager were trying to explain string theory.

In other words, I didn't think much of A Short History of Nearly Everything.

But at least it's science writing. And despite my unease with some of the approaches Bryson took to some of the subjects, he respects reason, the Enlightenment and the scientific method. How then to the explain this email from Amazon:

Dear Amazon.ca Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson have also ordered Culture Warrior by Bill O'Reilly. For this reason, you might like to know that Bill O'Reilly's Culture Warrior will be released Audio CD on September 25, 2006. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 34% by following the link below.

Could it be that Amazon is ranking their authors according to degrees of arrogance? Seems unlikely. What about the books' content? Another null set. I can't find any common ground between an over-reaching review of the history of science with this description from Publisher's Weekly of O'Reilly's "latest screed"

against a "secular-progressive movement" supposedly led by billionaire George Soros ("public enemy number one") and the liberal rhetorician George Lakoff. O'Reilly condemns the "erosion of societal discipline" flowing from an alleged "S-P [secular-progressive]" agenda of drug legalization, teenagers' rights, moral relativism, church-state separation ... ACLU Christmas-bashers who wanted schools to stop teaching kids to sing carols, and permissive judges who go easy on child molesters.

Any alternative theories?