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Popular Crime by Bill James
As I age (46 in two weeks) I get less and less enamored of passing along my opinion (review) of a work let alone allowing my own mind to be made up about a work I've not sampled by the opinions/reviews of others. The human mind is woefully prone to anchoring on initial information. I'm old enough to remember when pet rocks were cool, mood rings were awesome, and shows such as "Welcome Back Kotter" were actually considered not bad.
I think it's reasonable to say that if no one in my herd said, "Stones make great companions", "It's fun pretending that jewelry that responds to body temperature corresponds to my emotional state" or, "Man, Gabe Kaplan is a comic genius" I would not have settled on those opinions on my own. But...I had a pet rock, played with a mood ring, and watched enough "Kotter" to remember the "Sweathogs" by name.
What I'm saying is, anchoring on others' opinions, opinions which are mere reflections of a work and not the work itself, can steer us wrong as often as they steer us right. Now that I've tipped my hand to the fact that I avoid partaking of reviews myself as much as is reasonably possible so that I can truly make up my own mind about a work, I now do you a disservice and offer you my own anchor.
Bill James' recent book Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence is such a curious animal that it may be of interest to those of you who focus on the reality aspect of combat. Some of you may recognize Bill James as the originator of sabermetrics, an analytical statistical tool that led to re-vamping the way we think about team construction in baseball. James brings that same analytical eye to the issues of true crime novels, criminal justice reform, the value of the police sketch, penal reform, and a host of other topics.
The books construction is broadly chronological with the thought-provoking suggestions interspersed here and there without any seeming pattern to when the intriguing idea will drop. It is for this reason that, if this sounds like your cup of tea, I encourage a cover-to-cover reading to follow the entire thread of his thinking.
While I found myself not agreeing with every suggestion or observation (I'll keep those to myself, as I don't need to anchor you any more than I already have) there is enough surprising grist for the mill to keep street combatives personnel who keep an eye on the criminal justice system mulling for hours.
So, in a nutshell, if you anchor on this review, read the book and enjoy it, I'd be glad to hear it (Better yet, let Bill know). If you anchor, read it, and don't care for it--my apologies for wasting your time but, you can't say I didn't warn you about anchors.
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