![]() 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. ![]() My absolute favorite passage in “Wonderland” comes in a section about the delight furnished by printed cotton. ![]() “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. ![]() 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. 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. Red wires connect haphazardly to blue, and sparks fly. Marvelous circuits of prose inductors, resistors and switches simulate ordinary history so nearly as to make readers forget the real thing. Steven Johnson’s “Wonderland” makes a swashbuckling argument for the centrality of recreation to all of human history. ![]() WONDERLAND How Play Made the Modern World By Steven Johnson 322 pp. ![]()
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