Brandon Celi

This book review puts our work, with would be categorized as providing recreation services, in an interesting context:

Steven Johnson on How Play Shaped the World

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

WONDERLAND
How Play Made the Modern World
By Steven Johnson
322 pp. Riverhead Books. $30.

Steven Johnson’s “Wonderland” makes a swashbuckling argument for the centrality of recreation to all of human history. The book is a house of wonders itself. Marvelous circuits of prose inductors, resistors and switches simulate ordinary history so nearly as to make readers forget the real thing. Red wires connect haphazardly to blue, and sparks fly. Who needs a footnoted analysis of “the ludic,” as play is known to the terminally unplayful? Barnumism of the Johnson kind is much, much more fun.

If “Wonderland” inspires grins and well-what-d’ya-knows of legitimate wonder — and it does — it also liberates its audience to wantonly savor them. “You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,” Johnson writes, and damned if the human capacity for dawdling over Candy Crush and skipping after shiny objects isn’t convincingly ennobled here.

My absolute favorite passage in “Wonderland” comes in a section about the delight furnished by printed cotton. It seems the women of the 17th century who loved calico for its sweet appearance and sweeter texture — its fun, as Johnson has it — were once considered, of all things, anti-England, since the wool growers of Albion could not slake their thirst for softer textiles. Calico demanded global markets — and protectionists, wouldn’t you know it, were able to paint calico fans as nothing less than sluts. “None shall be thought/A more scandalous Slut/Than a taudry Callico Madam” went the “Spittle-Fields Ballad,” named for a neighborhood of English wool weavers.

Galloping onward, Johnson uses this extraordinary connection — do protectionism and misogyny always go hand in hand? A question for this election, even — to explain, well, everything. I am sold. Why did Obama overwhelmingly win a stretch of Southern counties in 2008? Johnson sees “a longer story: from the ancient geological forces that deposited that crescent of black soil, to the appetite for cotton stirred up by the shopkeepers of London, to the brutal exploitation of the plantation system engineered to satisfy that new demand.”

It’s the calico what did it. And — reading on — the flutes made of bone, the zoos, the purple dye made from snails, the roulette, the automatons of digesting and defecating ducks, and Minecraft. These novelties, in turn, are connected backward in time often to ancient forces — and then forward to their cultural derivations, including synthesizers, computers and the internet.

This is not a book to be a stickler about; that would be like pontificating about microbrews instead of just getting drunk. But for sterner historians, it’s worth noting that our ringmaster in “Wonderland” plays fast and loose with his central definition. “Play” here designates by turns novelty, delight, sport, games, prettiness, music of any kind, gambling, magic shows, spectacles, illusions and fashion. The word slips and skips like a pinball. If Johnson can show that the primary purpose of some pastime is not, strictly speaking, money, war or sex, he labels it play and closes his case. His pinball manages to light a lot of stuff up, so it’s hard to begrudge him this sometimes reckless game…