Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an appallingly bad book. The underlying premise - that our lives are dominated by irrational, media-inflamed fears that cause us to act against our own best interests - undoubtedly has a lot of merit. An honest, thoughtful exploration of this topic could yield valuable insights into American life. But if you're looking for those insights, you won't find them here. This train does not even get out of the station before it runs off the tracks. On page xv of the introduction Glassner says, "We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us." This is a perfect example of the kind of fear mongering the book purports to debunk, and it is a sign of what lies ahead. Culture of Fear is riddled with flimsy logic, thin documentation and pure assertion. Glassner picks odd "fears" to focus on and then often fails to debunk them. For example, he decries concerns about single motherhood by citing reporting of clearly marginal critics who focus on the morality of single motherhood rather than its social and economic implications. Having focused on the wrong issue, he then "debunks" it by citing studies showing that life outcomes for children of single- and dual-parent families are comparable - given comparable economic circumstances. This is a tautology - the playing field is level as long as it's level. Glassner completely ignores the key issue - the differences in economic circumstances themselves. These circumstances clearly are better for women who complete their education and are married or at least in stable relationships (and thus benefit from the economic support of a partner) before becoming parents than they are for young women who begin having children before they finish high school. The playing field is not level at all. Glassner devotes a few pages to the fear of pedophilic priests. (This book was published in 1999, before the true extent of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal was fully known). He argues that the media inflated this fear through relentless coverage and reliance on excessive estimates. Of course, he cites only a single source to refute these estimates - a Catholic priest who was understandably troubled by the coverage. More importantly, he completely ignores the core reasons for entirely legitimate concern. It's not that people think all or most, or even many, priests are guilty, as he suggests. Rather, people are outraged because any incident of priestly abuse is violates a deep trust and because the Church hierarchy evidently knew about it and covered it up. Elsewhere, Glassner focuses on fears that we are raising a generation of wild, violent children. The book was published shortly before Columbine, an event suggesting that these fears may not be so exaggerated. Glassner cites the horrific murder of a 3-year-old boy by two 10-year-olds in England, arguing that the media unjustifiably focused on concern that the murderers might represent a trend. The evidence Glassner cites in response consists entirely of a quote from a single British journalist relating a conversation she had about the crime with her 10-year-old son. Meanwhile, Glassner almost completely ignores perhaps the most significant and over-inflated fear we have about our children - that they will be abducted (and worse) by a stranger. As I understand it, the per capita incidence of such crimes has not changed much over the years. What has changed is how extensively they are reported. Any parent can understand the fear these reports generate. But in the aggregate they have caused us to raise a generation of children who have not been allowed to go outside, explore their surroundings, take little risks and spontaneously make friends and play with them. The consequences of this change in child-rearing are yet to be understood. This would be a wonderful subject for a sociologist to explore. Glassner's exploration of this issue is a total of two pages long and is devoted entirely to the failure of two business that provided child-identification services (information that would argue against, rather than for, the proposition that this fear is over-inflated). As flimsy as these sections of the book are, it gets worse. In the chapter on children, Glassner argues that our fears reflect our "unacknowledged guilt" over public policy. "By slashing spending on educational, medical and anti-poverty programs for youth," Glassner writes, "we adults have committed great violence against them. Yet rather than face up to our collective responsibility we project our violence onto young people themselves, and onto strangers we imagine will attack them." Where is the evidence for these assertions? Spending on the programs he cites has done nothing but increase over the years - any "slashing" has amounted only to reducing the rate of growth. The notion of guilt-transference is a psychobabble assertion made by the author without a shred of support.. Similarly, Glassner offers up gun control as the needed solution to a host of problems. I happen to agree with him that it is a good idea, but he presents it as a panacea without a bit of evidence. The book is riddled with unsupported assertions of this kind. In the end, Culture of Fear is not a sociological study at all. Rather, it is mostly an editorial in favor of Glassner's political opinions. It is interesting to note that Glassner is a crony of, and has been highly influential on, filmmaker Michael Moore. The difference between them which works in Moore's favor, is that Moore makes no pretense of being anything other than an editorialist. He grabs facts that support his opinions, manipulates them to increase their emotional impact, and blithely ignores information that runs counter to his cause. Glassner does the same thing, but in the disappointing guise of social science. There are interesting lessons to be learned from Culture of Fear, but they are not the ones Glassner intended. The fact that this book was released at all is a sad commentary on the state of the publishing industry. And the fact that it got remarkably good reviews from people who should know better is an even sadder comment on the state of thinking in America. The people who fall for this book are likely to be the same ones who fall for the over-hyped, irrational fears that are supposed to be its subject.