MARCH 2, 2007

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NONFICTION: The Enlightened Bracketologist

The most valuable benefit the NCAA basketball tournament provides — beside easy money won from friends and co-workers — is closure: In every round, someone wins, someone goes home, and someone is demonstrably better than everyone else. Why can’t all disputes, no matter how subjective, be settled so definitively?

This is precisely the public service that Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir’s The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything (out 3/6) offers: In 101 of the pettiest cultural categories — e.g., Bob Dylan cover songs, James Bond gadgets, bald guys — the authors and their team of contributors have pitted the 32 top entries against each other, in elegant NCAA-style brackets (created by design legend Nigel Holmes), and conclusively determined a winner in each field.

Greatest priceless thing? The Magna Carta tops the Mona Lisa, says Sotheby’s executive Leila Dunbar. Best punctuation mark? The space beats the semicolon, says OED editor Jesse Sheidlower. We could argue with some of the individual results (Tetris a better video game than The Legend of Zelda?!?), but our admiration for Bracketology, like the decision of the judges, is final.

BUY The Enlightened Bracketologist (Bloomsbury USA; 224 pages, hardcover)

VIEW sample brackets from The Enlightened Bracketologist (use the green ENLARGE link to zoom in)

VIEW additional brackets at Slate starting March 12

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