Book Reviews
Be Still and Know that I am Bright
by penny edgell
Daniel C. Dennet’s Breaking the Spell mixes a careful review of some excellent work with a poorly conceived and executed polemic. Slipshod in reviewing scholarship inconvenient to his argument, Dennett levels petty outbursts throughout toward particular scholars and general categories of people. The “brights” are scientific elites, aggressively bumping shoulders with religious elites, vying for power as part of an historic struggle. They, and we, should ask the tough questions about where religious ideas are best addressed in society, and none of us should be pilloried for asking, or for a strong secularist answer. But the brights have not been pilloried.
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The Most Dangerous Crime Rankings
by richard rosenfeld and janet l. lauritsen
The information contained in the City Crime Rankings, which is less a book and more a compendium of statistical tables, provides an important opportunity. It allows us to discuss the appropriate uses and limitations of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data and the role responsible social scientists and journalists can play in starting a meaningful conversation about this nation’s crime policy. There’s nothing objectionable about organizing and disseminating crime data in tabular form. The problem comes in using those data to designate the residents of some cities as “safe” and the residents of others as in “danger” based on an undisclosed, proprietary scoring methodology applied to the FBI’s crime statistics.
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A Big Take on the World’s ‘Little People’
by alford young jr.
Public attention directed toward the wealthy seems to take the form of intrigue about what they do. The impoverished, however, seem to attract attention for their perceived lack of meaningful employment opportunities or prospects for pursuing upward mobility, their perpetual struggle with destitution and despair. We wonder whether they ascribe blame to others or themselves for their life situations, what they think they can do about their plight, or what they think about the more privileged in society. In Poor People, William T. Vollmann attempts to answer this first question and, in doing so, offer some insight into the others. Vollmann intends to address what’s in the minds of poor people by literally trekking across the globe to meet and interview them. His succinct title severely contrasts with the enormity of the task at hand in this volume.
