Panicology [Kindle Edition]

I picked this up in the hope of reading a reasoned and intelligent riposte to the kind of absurd, knee-jerk moral panics so often whipped up by the media in this day and age. Every day we read and watch reports on unsupported, insane and sometimes downright dangerous beliefs; birdflu will kill us all, MMR causes autism etc. This book puports to 'strip away the hysteria which surrounds over forty of today's most common scare stories.' It fails miserably.

To begin with prose is dry and too often resembles a rambling stream of consciousness. The arguments being put forward are thinly sketched out and poorly constructed, such that too often it is impossible to glean just what it is the authors are trying to say. This is surely a cardinal sin in writing, no matter what the form or subject. The unfocused and incoherent nature of the book should have condemned it to the pile on the editor's desk marked 'Rejected'.

Often passages are just lists of statistics about various subjects, with no analysis or commentary of any note. While the stats may be interesting in isolation (Europe's population is due to decline by 2050, for example), without any examination or conclusions they are effectively useless. The stats are presented in a vacuum with no effort made to present what the might 'mean' to the average person; surely the rationale behind the book itself.

The use of forty examples spreads the authors very thin. We are treated to bite-sized snippets on vitally important issues like obesity, global warming and inequality that tell us nothing we don't already know. Far from dispelling one's fears about these issues (as the author's explicitly promise in their introduction) we get a few paragraphs telling us 'People eat too much salt, that's probably bad.' As though that were not appallingly self-evident to just about everyone who might pick up this book.

Note also the weasel word 'probably', there's a lot of that here. Rather than making judgments, the authors appear to have no fixed opinions on a whole host of issues, preferring to offer a 'maybe this will happen, maybe it won't'/'this could be bad or it could be good' formula to pretty much every issue. The entire text is an excerise in saying; 'Well things may go very wrong in the 21st century, or they may not, we just don't know.' Frankly I didn't need a 270 page book to tell me that.

While both authors appear to be statisticans, you wouldn't have guessed it from the work itself. There is no original research, nor any real sets of hypotheses. What we are treated to are references to newspaper articles and stats and tables you could throw together in twenty minutes with the help of Google. No University would allow an undergraduate to hand up poorly researched work wholly lacking in analysis or conclusions, how then can these men be allowed to hand up such dross?

Finally the foul cherry on top of this woeful cake is the inane, incoherent, apparently arbitrary rating system at the end of each section to indicate...well it's not made at all clear. It's silly and totally out of step with the dry, joyless trudge that makes up most of the book.

The best and only advice I can give is; AVOID, AVOID, AVOID.

.. for those who want to see how fear-ridden we have become, beyond all reason... or to show someone else the same...

I bought this book with high hopes of decent insights but was sorely let down. The writing isn't particularily bad; it just doesn't lead to any firm conclusions. Added to this is a seemingly random series of 'Panicology' symbols at the end of each segment that appear to have no relevance to the proceeding section or, indeed, to anything at all. No explanation is given as to how they are arrived at or what they actually mean.
More a rambling stream of consciousness than a useful book. Poor.