Put-downs …

… Book Review: A Slap in the Face - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mr. Irvine's book, by contrast, is aimed squarely at the lay reader, who is spared the jargon of so much academic prose if not its mannered throat-clearing. He cannot resist the pedantic convention of telling us what he is about to tell us, as if his revelations will be so startling or difficult to understand that fair warning is required, and sometimes he tells us what he has just told us. "In this chapter," he writes at one point, cavalierly insulting the reader's intelligence despite his avowed pacifism, "we have examined the pain caused by insults."