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The cover, complete with glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly, lead me to believe this was a serious book on the ever-increasing role of forensic science in modern criminology. The preface, however, tells another story. Here Miller reveals that "the names of the characters, places, and certain incidents and photographs... have been changed and/or fictionalized." This information is repeated in a note to the reader immediately following the preface, making his claim of the forensic details being genuine hard to take seriously. The alphabetical index in the back lends an air of legitimacy to the book, though referencing material that may or may not be "changed and/or fictionalized" seems pointless.
While entertaining, this collection of 16 stories read like a cheap detective novel. The stories themselves are indeed fascinating, but I found them impossible to read without wondering just how much truth, if any, they contained. The details of the forensic procedures used to solve these "cases" may be technically accurate, but they were lost in the film noire, dime-store style of storytelling. The stories are all fairly predictable, thanks to an abundance of stereotyped villains, persistent gumshoes and thick-headed cops.
What the Corpse Revealed was informative in one respect; I now know where the expression "you can't judge a book by its cover" came from. I'll be more careful next time I go book shopping.
The book explains to the readers what certain terms such as sadism and machoism refer to without going into details or overexplaining things. Forensic findings are illustrated and easy to comprehend. In cases where findings are not always agreed upon by all forensic experts, it is so noted as in the case of "drowing" - whether or not a person died as a result of drowing by the presence of certain things in the bloodstream.
I enjoyed each chapter and I'm amazed at the extent of work they go through to uncover the crime and find the offender. It's a good read for story-telling purposes. Out of the sixteen cases, you're bound to learn something new unless you already work in forensics!
Miller's ploy was presenting these cases, oft macabre, in a titillating fashion which presents to the reader's mind both the intuititive reasoning and troubling frustrations tediously overcome by dedicated diligence of forensic detectives. The grisly and deplorable acts are methodically traceable to the underlying motives in virtually each instance, and this works to advantage to find closure on especial cases which might otherwise seem inexplicable.
The book's style makes for easy but informative reading, and its one of those books that once started is hard to put down; and having read one or more cases (15 to 20 pages each) the reader feels compelled to recite the details to whomever will hear him out.
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In the book's final chapter, Fox and Miller use their model of discourse as a conceptual tool for assessing the efficacy of an array of real-world programs designed to employ discourse in governance. Their case analysis ranges from instances of elite-dominated manipulation at one extreme to expressionistic anarchy at the other. While they judge both these forms of participation to be democratic dead ends, they find hope or "intimations" in a few cases--for example, bioethical health decisions in Oregon, the Phoenix Futures Forum, the neighborhood health-care program studied by Cam Stivers--that discourse of the kind their model prescribes is possible. These projects had problems, but they also show possibilities. Such "nascent" forms of authentic discourse suggest that where democratic process approximates the out-lines of their model, it begins to achieve the structuration and coherence required of efficacious democratic discourse. As a final note, Fox and Miller prescribe a proactive role for public administration, whereby each administrator would capitalize on every opportunity to reach public action through a process of agonistic discourse with citizens. The key to administrators being able to achieve a proactive stance is that they must learn to listen, which is, of course, the core of the inclusiveness that their idea of discourse seeks.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE ANALYSIS: I mentioned that I found the critiques of the Blacksburg Manifesto and of communitarianism to be especially engaging and that the book's description of the post-modern political condition is one of the most cogent and gripping I have encountered. These were great highlights. The standout feature of the book, though, is the general integrity of its argument. I have used this book as a supplementary text in two of my graduate courses. While my students (most of whom had minimal exposure to philosophy of the sort employed in the book) often found the philosophical concepts and argumentation to be difficult, they were, nonetheless, thoroughly engaged and followed the argument well. I disagree with the suggestion that this book is thin on practical proposals. I came away from it, and certainly from my discussions of it with students, with a vividly clear idea of what these authors were arguing. In this respect, it is a great book for fostering the very productive discourse that it advocates.
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