Clear Thinking About Crime

Calling a book a popularization is usually taken as an unkind remark. This is mostly a matter of snobbery: the popularizer is writing for the masses and, therefore, his work must lack depth and sophistication. But popularizations need not be shallow, and to think only of those that fit the stereotype is to ignore the service performed by good popularizations.

Most people are, at best, functionally illiterate with respect to a number of specialized fields. Yet some knowledge of these fields is often needed to think rationally and to some purpose about public issues. A good popularization makes the esoteric knowledge embedded in a special language of jargon accessible to a lay public without sacrificing too much meaning. Since few i...