Stephen's got Bill James, who's apparently a baseball guru of some sort. His newest book, though, is Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence. At first glance, it's got potential. Here's the publisher's info:
The man who revolutionized the way we think about baseball now examines our cultural obsession with murder—delivering a unique, engrossing, brilliant history of tabloid crime in America.
Celebrated writer and contrarian Bill James has voraciously read true crime throughout his life and has been interested in writing a book on the topic for decades. Now, with Popular Crime, James takes readers on an epic journey from Lizzie Borden to the Lindbergh baby, from the Black Dahlia to O. J. Simpson, explaining how crimes have been committed, investigated, prosecuted and written about, and how that has profoundly influenced our culture over the last few centuries— even if we haven’t always taken notice.
Exploring such phenomena as serial murder, the fluctuation of crime rates, the value of evidence, radicalism and crime, prison reform and the hidden ways in which crimes have shaped, or reflected, our society, James chronicles murder and misdeeds from the 1600s to the present day. James pays particular attention to crimes that were sensations during their time but have faded into obscurity, as well as still-famous cases, some that have never been solved, including the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Boston Strangler and JonBenet Ramsey. Satisfyingly sprawling and tremendously entertaining, Popular Crime is a professed amateur’s powerful examination of the incredible impact crime stories have on our society, culture and history.
And here's Kirkus:
An offbeat, sweeping examination of true crime in America (and occasionally other nations).
James (The Bill James Baseball Abstract, etc.) has been a controversial figure among professional baseball fans for decades, as he has invented statistical measures of player and team performance. Turning his iconoclastic mind to true crime, the author offers analyses of specific murder cases that have aroused passions about innocence or guilt (Lizzie Borden, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Sacco-Vanzetti, the Boston Strangler, the Black Dahlia, O.J. Simpson, JonBenét Ramsey, the Kennedy assassination and dozens more); opines about the causes and effects of crime throughout a complex society such as the United States; and evaluates previously published crime books. James is aware that tabloid-type accounts of crime often exploit tragedy to provide popular amusement, but he writes that the best reporting about true crime also conveys important human stories and educates citizens who are mostly ignorant about the criminal-justice system. The author suggests a thought process that contains 18 elements characterizing crime stories, including those in which an innocent defendant pursues justice, in which sexual violence is involved and so on. Why bother? Because the inclusion of certain elements, he writes, helps determine whether any given murder will become a crime sensation. During his analyses of specific cases, James frequently pricks conventional wisdom within the criminal-justice system. Those already inside the system, especially lawyers, are unlikely to question many of his fundamental tenets, giving the author’s admittedly amateur critiques needed visibility.
Certain to engender controversy in the law-enforcement realm, as James has previously done in the world of baseball, where his seemingly revolutionary notions are now accepted by some members of the establishment.
The Washington Post, though, has this:
I am a big Bill James fan. In the 1970s and ’80s, his Baseball Abstracts revolutionized how we thought about what we used to call our national pastime. Marrying peppy prose to deep statistical analysis, he exploded preconceived notions and helped usher in the Moneyball Era by focusing on the runs a ballplayer created rather than the more obvious and gaudy numbers. Who can forget his brilliant and persuasive analysis that Mickey Mantle was far better than Willie Mays? James is an American original, sui generis.
Now with “Popular Crime,” he turns his formidable but idiosyncratic critical apparatus on murder and mayhem. The results are mixed, in my opinion at least, (perhaps because I know more about crime than I do about baseball), although there are plenty of Jamesian pleasures to savor along the way.
“Popular Crime” is a very entertaining book, and it will instigate arguments even as it scores many important points. But first, it’s necessary to say what it isn’t. It is not a book about criminology, crime in America or crime policy, and it is not a work of history, sociology or journalism. There is no original research here. It is, quite simply, a book about crime stories, written by a guy who says he’s read about a thousand of them. By popular crime, James means “tabloid crime,” or what is called in the bookstores “true crime,” mainly murder. He’s interested in the big stories that dominate and drive — or are driven by — the media: JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. Simpson, the Zodiac Killer, the JFK assassination, Sam Sheppard, the Black Dahlia, the Lindbergh kidnapping. All the greatest hits are here, and so are many more that have been forgotten by history...
Experts will immediately object to the armchair nature of James’s amateur enterprise. In his defense, he is at the ready with plenty of disclaimers...Indeed, his complete focus on high-profile murders can induce myopia. Read this book, and you’ll never realize that murders make up only .14 percent of reported U.S. crime and that the murder rate now is almost exactly what it was in 1964. You’ll read barely a word about organized crime, Prohibition or the modern-day phenomenon of the drug trade. In my mind, the explosion of the drug trade and the social unrest of the 1960s had at least as much to do with rising crime rates as any rulings by the Warren court, but James does not entertain that possibility...
In the end, James’s layman status is a big part of this book’s bracing charm. And his real point is more universal. He loves crime books and wants you to love them, too, and not just because they’re a good way to pass the time in a motel room or airport. He wants you to take them seriously, as he does, and consider the ways they reflect and reshape the culture, what they say about our justice system and our very concept of justice. “We are trying to have a serious discussion of Trash here,” James writes, and popular crime stories “are much more central to American history than most people understand.” He wants you and America’s intelligentsia to lose your condescension when talking about them...
And here's the only other review I found (even looking at Amazon & B&N), from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
At first glance, Bill James' ruminations on several centuries of murder in America have the feel of an important, almost sociological study of why heinous crimes have become a national obsession...
Why, for instance, did so many viewers spend hours watching the so-called "slow-speed chase" of O. J. Simpson in which nothing happened?
Mr. James proposes to address that question and a pile of others using the skills he developed compiling his famous "Baseball Abstracts," a refreshing analysis of another obsession, sports statistics.
Stats, though, are hard data; crimes of passion often defy logical explanations. Mr. James is a self-professed crime-story junkie who can't wait to tell readers what arcane facts and personal opinions he's gathered from years of reading about lurid misdeeds...
His conclusions, however, are those of a dilettante, particularly his accounts of certain U.S. Supreme Court decisions that he believes created more crime.
"Popular Crime" is entertaining, but it's not something to be taken seriously. Mr. James doesn't even take himself too seriously, except when he's blaming the nation's highest court for a growth in crime.
"The damned foolishness of the Warren Court unleashed upon us a torrent of criminal violence which pitched the nation backwards into atavistic attitudes about crime and punishment," cries Mr. James.
The "foolishness" was the "Miranda Warning," actually a series of rulings the court made in the mid-1960s, forcing police to "jump through hoops" when questioning suspects...
While praising the Warren court for its concern about "essentially good ideas" (constitutional rights), Mr. James believes its decisions went overboard by applying them to everyone, from Charles Manson on down.
How this altered attitude prompted criminals to commit more crimes, as Mr. James argues, remains a hard sell, a cause that he cannot effectively turn into a verifiable effect, like turning a stack of batting records into determining what makes an effective hitter.
"Popular Crime," then, is best viewed as an engagingly written history of well-publicized deadly crimes.
However, Mr. James' endorsement of another theory in the assassination of John F. Kennedy falls into the improbability range...
Oh well. Could still be an entertaining interview, if you're into that sort of thing... |