I am studying a Masters Degree and have read this book as part of my research. I am now ordering it because I want my own copy. Though this book is academic in its structure, I found it a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful read. The world of drug taking and adolescents is filled with mythology and fear. For so many parents the ultimate fear is to find out that your child is taking drugs. Reading this book will provide a deeper understanding of this adolescent behavior. It does not discount the risks or discard the validity of parental fear, but rather provides a broad and realistic insight into the young people who take drugs as part of their social world.

This book is really a good sociological study of who undergoes a midlife crisis as symbolized by loss of a job or getting downsized from a career. This career crash usually happens due to some underlying pathology which leads to recovery and drastic changes in the occupation if not lifestyle, hence it can be considered a mid-life crisis. The book's only weakeness is that like so many other self-help books, this one concerns the minority of successful and ambitious career climbers and burned out academia members to the exclusion of the rest of the people who inhabit the regular working world and to whom Apartments on Fifth Ave, New York and law firm partnerships are unattainable dreams rather than something they would rather walk away from for a lighter work schedule.

In the course of reading Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear," I was surprised that Glassner took a more balanced view than I had at first expected. After being featured in left-wing muckracker, Michael Moore's latest film, "Bowling for Columbine," I had assumed Glassner, too, had produced a one-sided liberal rant about the corporate-controlled media interests. I was wrong.

While some of Glassner's conclusions may be questionable, like his statements without clear evidence that the availability of guns are almost entirely to blame for the nation's violence, much of his book is filled with example-after-example of familiar media-propagated scares of the 1990s along with well-researched statistics to debunk the myths. After reading the book, the pattern became clear of how the media spins its stories to make them deliberately misleading in order to sell fear and keep viewers and readers plugged in. I believe this educational experience has made me a more savvy and skeptical consumer of the news.

While Glassner's primary target in "The Culture of Fear" is the media, other groups are also shamed along the way (and they aren't all conservatives, either!) For instance, he spends a fair amount of time accusing feminists of propagating the silicone breast implant scares for symbolic gains even as study-after-study, some very large, involving tens of thousands of women showed no increased evidence of medical problems due to the implants.

One trend that I found amusing in many of the scares is that genuine experts are often ignored in the propagation of the fears. When genuine experts are consulted and disagree with the media's spin, their rational hard-facts explanations are often dismissed with a brush of the hand from the interviewer and followed by a, "but what about all the children?" or "but you can't deny people are suffering?" when there may be no connection between the suffering and the purported cause or the chances of the threat occurring being several times less likely than being struck by lightning. Instead, for airline safety stories, we rely on "seasoned traveler" Joe Blow, as if by riding an airplane a couple times a month Joe is an expert or we rely on college student and self-proclaimed researcher, Marty Rimm, for all that is known about Cyberporn and our children's exposure to it. (Rimm achieved earlier fame by manipulating the media in high school with a trumped-up scare of teenagers spending time in New Jersey casinos. Later debunked, you'd think the media would be more skeptical of him when he applied his manipulation tactics again.) The pattern is similar: when reporters are trying to propagate a scare, they find whomever they can to agree with their pre-decided point-of-view, not matter their dubious qualifications, and ignore anyone who casts doubt on the sensationalized arguments, regardless of their authority.

Yes, I am sure there are conclusions within the book that will make conservatives irate, like the observation that it is poverty that causes crime, not race or crack, but it is interesting to find out that in an era when crime rates were dropping, coverage of crime increased 600%, thus creating an impression on the public that crime is out of control. And, no, things aren't any worse now than they were before...a lot of bad things happened in the past, too, like kids killing kids, but it is the media coverage, not the trend that is growing.

Overall, it is a good read and well-documented. Most of the spin is transparent enough to separate it from the interesting factual data contained within it. If you are living in fear of terrorism or any of the other scare-du-jour, this book is definitely worth a read.

A detailed analyses on that which fathers the violence in our Nation. How true his argument becomes when you start to notice the 'fear' that bombards you every day--junk mail, commercials, radio, magazines. It's quite ubiquitous. Travel to Europe or Canada and you'll really notice the difference. See "Bowling For Columbine" as a great follow-up on our nation of FEAR!

Glassner took 5 years off from teaching sociology at USC to write "Culture of Fear." It certainly shows. This book is a meticulously-footnoted indictment of mass media's distortion of reality. Among the things that Glassner skewers is the media's portrayal of teen moms & young black men as destroyers of American society, road rage, plane crashes, & health woes related to breast implants. The basic premises that Glassner covers are these:

1) Mass media creates panics & hysterias from a few isolated incidents. 2) Anecdotal evidence takes the place of hard scientific proof. 3) The experts that the media trots out to make comments really don't have the credentials to be considered an expert. 4) Entire categories of people are christened as "innately dangerous" (like the aforementioned teen moms and young black men)

Sometimes Glassner's tone towards media is very snide, which may turn the reader off. Nonetheless, I came away with a new distrust of nightly news magazines, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and others. Glassner goes for breadth rather than depth; many of the topics that he covered could be books in their own right. If you lean towards the Christian Conservative side, you won't like this book. Same goes for 2nd Amendment proponents, some Republicans and Libertarians.