Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads.(Book review)

Social Forces, June, 2007 by Grazian, David

Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads By Joel Best University of California Press, 2006. 201 pages. $19.95 (cloth)

Perhaps it is fitting that I first stumbled upon Joel Best's latest book, Flavor of the Month, in a bookstore at the airport. Like some of his previous efforts, including Damned Lies and Statistics (University of California Press 2001) and its follow-up More Damned Lies and Statistics (University of California Press 2004), Best's Flavor of the Month presents simplified and easily-digestible sociological arguments to a lay audience. Since the runaway success of The Tipping Point (Little, Brown 2000), in which New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell translates published social scientific research by Neal Gross, Stanley Milgram, Thomas...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.