Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence [Hardcover]

I've been reading Bill James since the 1982 Baseball Abstract, so I was going to read this, too.

Ironically, James is at his best in this book when he just has fun thinking outside the box and plays detective, challenging conventional wisdom on a variety of random crime cases. When he tries to play sabremetrician, however, the results are embarrassing. There's a murder-classification system that he must have created for data analysis, but then there's no data analysis--perhaps because he correctly realized there was little quantifiable about the series of anecdotes. He tries to create a 100-point guide to guilt or innocence, but the metrics are all pulled out of thin air and are entirely unpersuasive.

But it is good to hear James expose the emperor's clothes on a feature of the American justice system: how much it is a gameshow of obfuscation on both sides, and how little criminal trials have to do with the truth. There are the obvious examples of recent Los Angeles celebrity cases, but the book earns its keep when it explores the historical record with tales of the corruption of Clarence Darrow and other noted criminal defense attorneys.

The book is entirely readable, but it's less a coherent book than a series of anecdotes: your eccentric uncle shooting the breeze about things he wants to talk about on the subject of crime and crime books. One gets the sense that the book wasn't published because it was finished, but it was finished because it was time to be published. So we see themes raised and dropped without rhyme or reason; the organization is chronological. Chronological, but not systematic: for example, the Stanford White case is disposed of quickly with the assumption that the reader already knows about it. (I don't, so I felt let down.) Some crime books get extensive reviews; others don't. As others have noted, it feels insufficiently edited.

I don't regret purchasing it, as I enjoyed reading it, but I can see the potential for disappointment. Don't think of it as a Baseball Abstract revolutionizing the field; it's more like the baseball books James wrote in the 1990s with Rob Neyer where the two dug through the historical archives to tell interesting anecdotes about baseball players in an alphabetical catalog that ended before it even got to the letter B: entertaining in places, inconsistent with spotty insights, and not remotely complete.

I enjoyed this book a lot, but I think I would have been better served by understanding exactly what it is before I started. It's subtitled, "Reflections on the Celebration of Violence," and the key word here is "reflections." This book is effectively hundreds of pages made up of a huge number of reflections. A reader searching for a single theme, or thesis that James is positing will be disappointed. Instead, readers should think of it as more of an invitation to go along for the ride as James thinks through a lot of the crimes that have gained popular attention throughout our American history. That's not to say that there aren't a couple of general themes, but the value in this book is simply the opportunity to see and think about these crimes the way Bill James does. He's a fiercely independent thinker, and isn't afraid to weigh in on these issues, though he makes a modest attempt to remain humble in light of his lack of practical experience in these matters. In the end, the book was anything but a waste of time, though I can't really say that I now understand crime in America any better than I did before. That's not the point of the book, of course. But I think I could forgive you for thinking that it's what the book was supposed to be about.

I've been a fan of Bill James for 30 years. He heavily influenced my thinking as a baseball fan, and more importantly, as a business executive and as a citizen. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Bill James taught me how to think critically. I learned as much from James's works over the years as I did from any professor, any manager, or any mentor.

So it's painful for me to write that this book is a disappointment pretty much across the board. It has a few positives. The book serves as a decent basic history of violent crime in the United States. And there's a fair bit of analysis of the evolution of the criminal justice system in the US as well.

However, the book's significant flaws seriously overwhelm its minor strengths. In my opinion these include the following:

1.) James is clearly self-conscious and defensive about his topic. He spends way too much time defending his interest in the history of crime in the face of various straw man arguments. James certainly has the right to be interested in, and to write about, anything he chooses. But far too much of the text is devoted to trying to convince the reader that it's not only OK to be interested in this topic, but that society is better off because of our fascination with the OJ murders, the Natalee Holloway case, the Black Dahlia, and so forth. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. The people who buy this book by definition have some interest in the topic. When the author spends page after page debating an argument about the value of the topic - an argument in which there is no opposing voice other than the straw men James invents - one eventually concludes that James himself is struggling with the validity of his own preoccupation.

2.) James's overt contempt for the Warren and Burger courts permeates the narrative to an extent that distracts from the book ostensible purpose. Rather than serving as a history of criminal activity, the book eventually seems more a thinly-veiled attack on those who believe that a person accused of a crime should have certain basic rights in order to defend himself. One interpretation of judicial history is that it is a constant search for some equilibirum among three competing aims: the need for a society to protect itself, the need for justice, and the rights of those accused of crimes to defend themselves. James unequivocally believes that as a society we have veered too far toward the latter objective, and more specifically that we did so during the 1960s and 1970s. He's certainly entitled to his opinion, but (a) if he wanted to write that book, he really should have titled and publicized it as such and (b) his own recounting of the history of crime in the US makes clear just how often innocent people - or people who quite likely were innocent - were convicted and even sentenced to death because the justice system in this country did not adequately protect them. Despite spending chapter after chapter on the cases of Leo Frank, Sacco and Vanzetti, Jimmy Smith, Albert De Salvo and others - all of whom James believes were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and/or executed - he still feels the need to bludgeon the reader with a series of polemics that amount to one idea: that liberals of the 60s and 70s granted too many rights to the accused and not enough to the police and judiciary. If he truly believes that, he chose an awfully awkward text in which to make his case. The conclusion I draw from the work is exactly the opposite: that if anything, we have been far too willing as a society throughout our history to convict - first in our minds and then in the courts - the first person accused of a crime.

(3) Perhaps the most disappointing section of the book is the brief treatment (roughly 12 pages) James gives to the JFK assassination. Here again James is certainly entitled to his opinions, but his presentation is shoddy, condescending, and frankly mind-boggling in its sophmoric approach to the subject. Further, it quickly becomes apparent that James is not familiar with much, if any, of the research that has been done on this case in the past two decades. James essentially endorses Gerald Posner's Case Closed as the definitive work on the subject. Actually, James is almost absurdly ingratiating in his praise of Posner: "I feel that Posner has accomplished a public service in putting it together." This is problematic on many levels. First, in the almost 20 years since Case Closed was published, many authors have argued persuasively against Posner, and in fact serious allegations have been made as to the integrity of Posner's research. James deals with none of this, and instead resorts to the usual ad hominems when referencing alternate interpretations of the evidence ("silly", "specious", "conspiracy theorists"). Second, the other book that James endorses (Mortal Error by Bonar Menninger) contradicts Posner's primary finding! Menninger concludes there was a second, albeit accidental, shooter. Posner insists there were no bullets fired by anyone but Oswald. You can't have it both ways Bill. The JFK assassination is a complex topic, on which hundreds of books have been written. To attempt to end the debate with 12 pages, while dealing with only one or two issues, neither of which are truly relevant to the question of whether a conspiracy existed, is just sloppy. Either give this topic the attention it deserves, and attempt to bring some new evidence or insight to it, or leave it for another book.

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