I'm impressed with Hayman's ease in presenting challenging material in an integrated framework that is made remarkably easy to understand. This is an important work that challenges various assumptions you never realized you had, but that now you can't deny having made, and made without real justification. It is by provoking that kind of analysis that Hayman's work has the potential to make us all "smarter." It's rare to find a book that conveys such moral passion for a truly egalitarian society, yet argues for that society using such carefully constructed rational arguments, often citing emprirical and historical resources, while also tapping into the author's personal experiences. Highly recommended.

Professor Hayman looks at an issue in our society that is rampant with misunderstanding and rife with malaise, the basing of intelligence among our myriad cultures. His work engages the reader with common sense and personal experience as well as superb research. I can only recommend this text in the highest of glowing terms, an essential read for any individual seeking to uncover one critical reason why our society is unjust and in need of balancing.

Nancy Levit *

In 1993 the Educational Testing Service renamed the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Amid controversy that the test contained racial and cultural biases, did not measure intelligence, and thus was inappropriately called an "aptitude" test, test officials changed the name of the SAT to the Scholastic Assessment Test. In 1997, the testing service again renamed its college entrance examination: the SAT became simply the SAT - initials only, no acronym, no squabbles over the meaning of aptitude, achievement, or intelligence. The same thing happens in workplaces all over the country. Employers pronounce that they make hiring decisions based on "merit" - and everyone nods.

In The Smart Culture: Society, Intelligence, and Law, law professor Robert L. Hayman, Jr., explodes the myths that everyone has come to accept about "intelligence," "merit," and "race." He then shows the ways in which law has been complicit ! in keeping these myths unexamined.

Hayman's thesis is simple and straightforward. We have bought into the very idea that there is a meritocracy, and that the meritocracy reflects a natural order. We assume that people succeed based on "merit." In actuality, those people who succeed - for reasons of race, property-ownership, and power - have been the ones who get to define "merit." Merit, as Hayman points out, is largely a definitional tautology: we identify certain characteristics we deem worthy (such as test-taking ability), and then call people who can perform those tasks laudatory labels ("smart"). We thus reward people who are worthy, based, of course, on the possession of the previously identified characteristics. Merit is not natural, Hayman says, "It is the carefully crafted product of centuries of cultural propaganda, a myth of natural inequality perpetuated by men in power - by a political, economic, and intellectual elite.&qu! ot;

Hayman makes the all-important link between race, me! rit, and intelligence. While our nation formally commits to equality under law, our culture still possesses deeply held beliefs about the natural inequalities of its citizens. From the time of its founding documents, our country promised equality. But declaring all men equal was not only a promise unfulfilled, it was a promise founded on a contradiction: the principle did not apply to women, slaves, and those without property. "A nation committed now to equality," Hayman writes, "remained fundamentally convinced that its people were, by nature, unequal."

This idea of natural differences between the races was promoted not only by Southern congressmen in the Reconstruction debates, but by the Western European "race scientists" of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the American eugenicists of the early 1900s, and the Aryan supremacists in 1930s Germany. It is a debate that has been resurrected in late twentieth century Americ! a by The Bell Curve.

The Smart Culture is a political history of the concept of intelligence. Hayman traces various projects of classifying human intelligence, demonstrating that the equation of intelligence and merit has little scientific validity, but enormous cultural appeal. Given the popularly accepted assumption that intelligence differences are a naturally occurring phenomenon, Hayman argues that racial equality will not occur until the myths surrounding intelligence are dismantled.

The Smart Culture is also a cultural history of the construction of race. This new racism, which is tied to our concepts of intelligence, and defended by arguments about "merit," is, as Hayman explains, really the old racism. The modern, righteously indignant and seemingly egalitarian calls for a color-blind society ignore the history and tradition of our treatment of race in America.

Despite evidence that the biological, genetic, and anthropological significance of raci! al classifications is modest, in America what we have chose! n to make count are the visible characteristics of race, such as skin color. For the Supreme Court, race is an immutable characteristic because of descent, ancestry, morphology, and physiognomy. Race, for the Court, and for most of America - white America, that is - is not a matter of culture, politics, economic enfranchisement, or lived experiences. "Racism," Hayman argues, "thus embraces not only the continued tendency to make of race what it is not - something biological, immutable, and inferior; racism embraces as well the refusal to recognize what race is - a powerfully significant social and political reality."

This review must come with a disclaimer, or perhaps a warning label. Reviews are supposed to be evaluations of merit. Having read what has gone before, you can probably sense the irony that is coming. Let me compound the irony of assessing the worth of Hayman's book with a confession: Bob Hayman and I have co-authored articles together! in the past. So for those of you who suspect that bias might infect this review, you may wish to stop reading before the descriptive project lapses explicitly into laudation.

Hayman's original research brings to life the actual debates of the Reconstruction Congress on slavery and racial differences, and he amasses the anthropological and genetic research regarding race and intelligence, but he drives his point home with stories. Hayman uses narratives to offer readers a glimpse into the formation of meritocracies. Each of the chapters in The Smart Culture contains a story, and in his stories you may recognize your childhood. The stories of Stephen and the Binky Fairy, Louis and the Jewish boy at the lunch table, Mrs. Sweeney's "retards," and Buddy, the impossibly stupid dog, all share a theme: the people in power are the ones who make the rules, who create insiders and outsiders, who name certain qualities or attributes and thereby make them important. The st! ories - sweet, wistful retrospectives, at times painfully s! elf-deprecating - are not to be missed, rivaling those from the great raconteurs of literature: Mark Twain meets Camus on the courthouse steps. In Hayman's stories, and his careful tracing of the political, scientific, and legal naturalization of race, are much broader implications than simply issues of racial inferiority. Systems of merit are everywhere, says Hayman. He describes how the territorial imperative of second graders at the school lunch table is learned, from aunts and uncles, from moms and dads. Hayman tells a story of schoolboys arguing whether the Phillies will take the pennant, and in the background, the girls in the class are a Greek chorus: "yea." Mini-meritocracies operate in sports (soccer games, football, sandlot games, Wall Ball), in school cliques, in gendered speech patterns, and in cocktail party conversations. They are manufactured. They are dangerous and destructive. And we make them.

The Smart Culture is more than a deconstruction! of the concept of intelligence. It is more than a painstakingly researched scientific, psychological, socio-cultural, and constitutional history of race. The Smart Culture is one of our generation's most powerful indictments of insidious racism and meritocracies - the kind in which we all participate, everyday.

*Nancy Levit is a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author of The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law (New York University Press 1998).

I have been reading, disecting, and deconstructing Artaud for well over ten years and find this volume to be indispensible. Well worth the price. The immedicacy and visceral quality of Artaud's words are captured on paper, and where as tapes of his anguished voice might crackle and fade in time, this first hand document of his perceptual experience is truly timeless. This is not only a firmly woven tapestry for those in the know, but also a good starting point for those wondering what all the fuss is about.

Authors James Hanock and James Kushlan, along with illustrators Robert Gillmor and Peter Hayman have put together a simply gorgeous guide to all the world's species of herons, egrets, and bitterns. A guide to herons on every continent except Antarctica, all 60 species as recognized by the book, it is a thorough treatment of each one. Each species has a breathtaking color illustration, many times an additional black and white illustration, the common name, genus and species name, alternate common names, when and who first described it as species, maps illustrating range (including directions of migration and areas of casual occurrences), several paragraphs describing in detail their physical appearance, notes on their distribution and population, migration, habitat, behavior flying, feeding, and breeding, descriptions of nests, eggs, and young, and a note or two on taxonomy. Subspecies are noted as well; for instance a two page color range map depicts the 30 subspecies of the green-backed heron, found throught the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and several Pacific and Indian Ocean island groups.

In addition to being a thorough field guide and collection of natural history notes on the world's herons, egrets, and bitterns the first section of the book contains useful articles on heron classification, courtship, feeding, and tips on identifying herons and egrets, including several color plates that aid in identifying the many white herons and egrets that live around the world. An extensive bibliography closes out this work.

Whether you want to read more about the great blue heron or the black-crowned night heron that lives around the local river or swamp, or something more exotic, like the black heron of Africa or the zigzag heron of South America, then this is the book for you. The book will also be of interest to conservationists, as several species such as the slaty egret have very restricted ranges (in this case known to breed only in the Okavango swamp in northwest Botswana) or very small populations such as Malagasy heron.