||
corruption he sees. It’s a courageous, very principled thing to do. Still, soon Jonah’s life and finances go from bad to worse until he hits rock bottom: slaving away in a low-paying job as a reference librarian for a county law library. Enter Julia. She’s a savvy young lawyer and library science student who’s put in charge of Jonah by the library’s tyrannical bosses. Having a superior who is 13 years his junior should be humiliating enough to make Jonah quit, which is just what the bosses want. But instead, the opposite happens. Love and romance blossom between Jonah and Julia in this story, rich in literary references (especially the unexpected pairing of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson) as the couple struggles to protect their newfound love. The Psychology of Populism: The Tribal Challenge to Liberal Democracy (Routledge) Extreme right- and left-wing populism pose the greatest threat to the world’s democracies today, argues Professor William Crano and his co-editors. Bringing together contributions from leading international researchers, they explore the psycho-
logical reasons for this rise, its tribal appeal, and the inevitable ideological polarization that results. “The first two decades of the 21st century were marked by a remarkable phenomenon,” writes Crano, who is Oskamp Professor of Psychology in the Division of Behavioral & Organizational Science, and co-editor Joseph Forgas in an introductory essay, “the largely unexpected rise of radical populist political ideologies in both well-established Western democracies and less-developed nations. This book represents an integrated attempt to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying these movements.” A liaison scientist for the U.S. Office of Naval Research, NATO senior scientist, and Fulbright senior scholar, Crano and his colleagues have produced a powerful and incisive guide to changes now roiling our world. Ulysses By Numbers (Columbia University Press) The first time a patent was filed for a “Paint by Numbers” kit was back in 1923, just a year after the appearance of James Joyce’s landmark novel Ulysses. The proximity of those two events is charged with meaning
for Professor Eric Bulson, who includes this fact in the introduction to Ulysses By Numbers, his new study of the modernist master’s great work. “Paint by Numbers” kits, he explains, use an outlined image with a numerically organized color scheme “that could be filled in by aspiring artists.” Bulson, who chairs the university’s English Department and is the Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair in the Humanities, wants us to see Ulysses in a similar light—as a text whose numerical aspects help us understand the book’s organization, its meanings, its composition, and much more. What, for example, are we to make of the Bloom household’s address at number 7 Eccles Street? Or the impact of deadlines and word counts on the chapters Joyce published in the Little Review? Or the meaning of the first print run (1,000 numbered copies) even though that number’s not entirely accurate? Asking such questions about Joyce's masterpiece (or, for that matter, many others) can result in rich insights, he argues, that enhance our understanding and “the way we engage with the texts we already love.” l THE FLAME Spring 2021
| 31