MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewWhat O’Neil adroitly illustrates is that shame is often a lonely experience, which is perhaps why it is so easy to exploit it for profit ... O’Neil carefully dismantles how we abdicate our social responsibility for caring for the vulnerable when we indulge in the notion that poverty and drug addiction result from a failure to self-actualize. It’s hard to argue with the author’s condemnation of what she calls \'punching down,\' a targeted brand of humiliation that allows structures of power to transfer blame onto exactly those who have been injured by them ... Where The Shame Machine seems to rattle off its tracks is in O’Neil’s discussion of what she refers to as \'healthy shaming\'—let’s call it a lateral punch ... Though O’Neil outlines how the lateral punch often successfully influences behaviors that result in a genuine collective benefit (she provides Covid-19 vaccinations as an example), she neglects to fully excavate what role sheer pleasure plays in our impulse to shame in those situations that have neither obvious victim nor victimizer.
