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| Actor Alan Ritchson as TV character Jack Reacher |
You may have heard of Jack Reacher. He is a character is a series of pulp fiction novels. Tom Cruise made a movie about him. The movie was great. I tried reading one of the books but failed.
But who is Brandy Jensen? She writes "essays for the internet for Christ's sake", and she does it very well. Here we have her wonderful take on the Jack Reacher books (she completely disagrees with me):
I particularly liked this paragraph:
Or maybe it’s something less formal that hooked me. The writer Andy Martin once described Reacher as “a liberal intellectual with arms the size of Popeye’s.” He’s not wrong, exactly. Reacher’s arms are indeed large and he is a liberal in the sense that he will rain down unspeakable violence in service of a cause he deems just. It’s the intellectual bit I quibble with. Reacher certainly thinks a lot—one of the singular joys of the books is following along as he puzzles through various problems. He engages in feats of ratiocination redolent of Sherlock Holmes (a character, in fact, notes that his nickname among some Army personnel is “Sherlock Homeless”) and it’s a good thing these passages are so propulsive because if you stopped for even a moment to ponder what he’s actually saying you would realize he’s completely full of shit. Reacher depends on what I tend to think of as Dad Wisdom: beliefs held dear and delivered with the utmost confidence that are nonetheless entirely baseless.
Bonus: we got a new word: ratiocination. I've seen it before, don't know that I've ever heard it. Not sure what it means, so I looked it up:
Noun. ratiocination (usually uncountable, plural ratiocinations) Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning. Thought or reasoning that is exact, valid and rational. - Wiktionary
Via Defector, which is some kind of sports / news website.
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