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Loading... Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (original 2011; edition 2012)by Bill James
Work InformationPopular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James (2011)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. NF I'm not entirely sure what this book is about - I mean, yes, it's about popular crime, but in what sense? It seems to be mostly about why certain stories become famous, but it's also about why crimes are and aren't solved effectively, what's wrong with the American justice system, and how things have changed over the past hundred or so years. James makes some assumptions and generalizations I think are flat wrong, but he also makes some excellent and interesting points. I had a fun time reading this, and I'd love to have a beer with the guy and discuss his ideas, so I'll call this book a success.
If you’re interested in baseball, you’re interested in Bill James — he’s the inventor of sabermetrics, the ideological engine behind Michael Lewis’ best-selling Moneyball, and the sport’s most influential writer and historian of the past 25 years. But you know what Bill James is interested in? Murderers. He’s interested in crime, the people who commit them, and — perhaps most tellingly — the people who write about them. Over the span of his 62 years, James has read (by his own estimate) more than 1,000 books on the subject of crime and spent countless hours trying to figure out what they really mean; he’s tried to understand both the nature of the criminal mind and the meaning of society’s relationship with acts of the unspeakable. Now, after decades of unconscious research, James has written Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence. It’s a fascinating, comprehensive, deeply strange book (it dissects crime literature as much as it dissects crime, sometimes seeming like the most intense 10th grade book report the world has ever seen).
Presents a cultural analysis of sensational crime in America that profiles such infamous cases as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Black Dahlia murder, and O.J. Simpson's trial to offer insight into topics ranging from evidence practices to radicalism. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)364.10973Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and OffensesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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