I bought this book a few years ago and got a few pages into it, then it got buried until 2 weeks ago when I read in on the plane. It is an easy, quick read (alas, too quick to cover me for my entire trip, to my dismay). I was intrigued by the concept behind this book, which is in principle as easy as shooting fish in a barrel: America as the home for a mountain of unfounded, overblown fears that blow through our culture like a Nor'easter but taking years to clear. Some of them, such as the oft-refuted child stranger-abduction scare, have never actually left us. For a wide variety of reasons, including the statistical illiteracy of the populace (ironically, one of the central reasons for the fear mentality that Glassner never mentions), we have the specter of hysterical over-reaction to the most minor threats while simultaneously ignoring far graver threats that are rarely if ever brought to the fore. Glassner does a good job in bringing forward the big scares of the mid-to-late 1990s (the latest data appear to be from ca. 1998, so rather outdated) and explaining how they evolved to the level of hysteria they elicited at their peaks, and, when applicable, how they declined out of the public eye. I really enjoyed the coverage, for example, of what Glassner calls _meta_phorical diseases such as Gulf War syndrome, flesh-eating bacteria, and his coverage of the child-abduction scares, including his de_script_ions of how profiteers and advocacy groups used these scares to cash in. The discussion of the successful personal intimidations of scientific investigators who exposed the fallacies behind the breast-implant scares was downright chilling, and I realized to my surprise that I had forgotten about these terrible events. Unfortunately, despite the brilliant idea that led sociologist Glassner to go after this too-easy-to-be-true polemic, in many ways he manages to blow it. Specifically, Glassner reveals himself to be a kneejerk liberal of the worst sort- someone who lets his arguments become riddled with hypocrisies small and large, and serious diminish the effect that his book should have enjoyed in influencing the national debate. This unthinking support for liberal causes comes through again and again, making it crystal clear that Glassner just couldn't resist the opportunity afforded by his revelations about national-hysteria episodes to insert a number of sometimes marginally-related diatribes against the transgressions of conservative politicians and personalities. For example, an early chapter was largely devoted to the horrors of reactionary anti-PC campaigns by the John Leos and Rush Limbaughs of the world, as though this particular campaign can truly be ranked among the likes of flesh-eating bacteria. Glassner goes on to mount spirited attacks on what he sees as selective highlighting of anti-Semitism by blacks while ignoring that of whites; his belief that female crime perps like Suzanne Smith are selectively demonized while male perps are not, etc. The most maddening for me was Glassner's tendencies to microscopically expose the statistical slights-of-hand by those who trumpet ills that he considers to be hysterical while a few chapters later, using the exact same techniques to buttress his liberal orthodoxy. For example, he carefully points out that certain categories of increases in crime by children , which he thinks overblown, are presented in terms of % increases rather than absolute numbers (which are small), yet later he uses the exact same strategy to try to prove that few men are killed or injured by their spouses, compared to the other way around. He cites the small fraction of male homicide victims that are killed by their spouses, compared to female homicide victims, completely ignoring the fact that the number of male homicide victims killed by non-spouses is an astronomically high number. There are many other such examples that contaminate Glassner's book throughout. So, on the plus side, the book is illuminating in many ways and says in one convenient place what many of us already knew about the various hysterias to which gullible Americans have been subject, and provides a substantial amount of supporting data that would take substantial amounts of time to dig up on one's own. On the downside, Glassner almost kills the goose that laid the golden egg by making no effort to conceal his huge secondary agenda- to wit, to promote a wide variety of liberal orthodoxies that end up shifting victimhood from patients with GWS to the usual cadre of liberal victims. The book is also quite out of date, but the principles behind it all still hold today. Rating: 3 out of 5. A buy, but barely.