About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Joanna Schwartz
Positive The Atlantic Schwartz’s focus is on understanding ... Even Schwartz, a fierce critic of law enforcement, acknowledges that over the past half century, “departments as a whole have become more professional.\
Ali Winston, Darwin BondGraham
Positive The Atlantic In harrowing detail, Winston and BondGraham describe the terror that Batt said Oaklanders endured at the hands of the Riders, as well as the ostracism Batt faced when he refused to honor the “blue wall of silence” that has long characterized cop culture. While the Riders’ actions may have been extreme, Winston and BondGraham view them as symptomatic of larger issues ... The Riders Come Out at Night is a longish book, and its story is largely a condemnation of the Oakland police. But readers who stick with it to the end will discover something surprising. Although change was slow to come to Oakland, it did come.
Jennifer L. Eberhardt
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...[an] unexpectedly poignant overview of the research on cognitive biases and stereotypes, especially racial bias in criminal justice ... Eberhardt gives striking examples from her research of how racial categories and stereotypes affect perception ... The experiments and observational studies reported in Biased are important and illuminating. They’re brought to life by stories from Eberhardt’s own experience ... The book has one weakness. Eberhardt doesn’t spend much time on alternative hypotheses. Implicit bias isn’t the only way to think about...the millions of...encounters that take place each year between citizens and the police.
Michele Gelfand
Mixed The New York Times Book Review Although Gelfand can occasionally come across as too much of a salesperson for her big idea, she’s generally an engaging writer with real intellectual range. She sparkles most when diving into evolutionary anthropology to make sense of long-term patterns in cultural tightness and looseness ... This is interesting stuff ... The problem is that...Gelfand routinely ignores materialist explanations for the various phenomena she considers ... She writes as though the hoarding of resources and opportunities by the wealthy was not a huge part of the story. The fact of the matter is that the very best research done today by social scientists straddles the culturalist-materialist divide ... Rule Makers, Rule Breakers could have benefited from some of the same balance and nuance.