Contemporary Sociology - American Sociological Association

More documents

Recommendations

Info

656 Editor’s Remarks the book. So by now it is May or June. The book is sent out immediately upon receipt of the reviewer’s promise to review, and the reviewer is normally given two months to send us useable material. It is now July or August. Typically reviewers do not abide by the 2-month deadline and sit on the book for a while longer, until they tire of hearing from us, repeatedly. It is entirely possible that we will not see a review until September or later. So the book has been in our ‘‘care’’ for 9or10months. Obviously, if a reviewer balks at the very end, we must start over practically from the beginning, especially if we have exhausted the finite list of potential reviewers nominated by our Editorial Board. Since timeliness matters, this situation hurts the author and publisher of the book under review, the internal workings and schedules of the CS staff, and probably the ozone layer. But there is, of course, a larger question about this inability to deliver the goods that transcends mere schedule-busting. Most of the hesitation seems to originate in a dread of angering or displeasing someone whom, in most cases, is personally unknown to the reviewer. What is the source of this timidity? CS would never allow a gratuitously meanspirited review to appear in its pages. But is it not a platitude in the Academy that lively, constructive, polite debate is the foundation of intellectual advance? Or is that too much a premodern notion in a postmodern world, Contemporary Sociology 39, 6 a print-era practice which our screen-driven existence has expunged since it exhibits too much in-your-face-ism? One could also talk about generational shifts, of course. What was ‘‘collegially proper’’ in 1910 was entirely crushed by 1925 via looser norms, and for good reason. So perhaps there is abroad a new set of interactional rules which prohibits straightforward disagreement or challenges to a stated scholarly position. Taken to its extreme, this would mean that journals like CS will cease to exist (until, inevitably, they are revived) since reviewing means by definition taking a position, explaining it, approving or disapproving of the book under review, and not being afraid to say whatever requires saying under one’s own name—not in anonymous reviews of the kind that used to appear in literary magazines. If it is, as I have argued in a previous editorial, a duty for scholars to carry out reviewing as part of their professional persona, then it follows that submitting a review one has agreed to write is equally dutybound. Short of debilitating illness, personal tragedy, or war, sending in the review one has promised to write, even if late (a common and forgivable occurrence), makes scholarly discourse at the highest levels possible. Riley Dunlap was instrumental in assembling the symposium on Freudenburg et al., and CS would like to thank him for his help.
A SYMPOSIUM ON CATASTROPHE IN THE MAKING: THE ENGINEERING OF KATRINA AND THE DISASTERS OF TOMORROW Canal to Hell: Elite Strategies as Blunder and Mayhem Although an obvious contribution to the field of environmental sociology, Catastrophe in the Making exemplifies a number of accomplishments more general to the sociological mission. First, it contains a lot of information, in this case about the causes of the Katrina disaster. Along the way it tells about the sociological nature of flood and its political and organizational dynamics. It joins the emerging school in environmental social science that presses home the point that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. But with a rare specificity, this book tells exactly what this ‘‘such thing’’ actually was (and is). The authors show the primary culprit to be the huge ditch completed in 1968 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to shorten the shipping route to the Gulf of Mexico from New Orleans. Instead of acting as a route to the Gulf, ‘‘MRGO’’—informally pronounced ‘‘Mister Go,’’ for ‘‘Mississippi River Gulf Outlet’’—acted in reverse as a ‘‘hurricane highway’’ for storm surge from the Gulf into the heart of the city. As other commentators were placing the blame on ‘‘mother nature’’ and/or the failure of various levees along the river, the authors concluded from aerial photographs and other evidence at their disposal that the key (albeit not the only) cause was this MRGO. In part, they knew it because two of them (Robert Gramling and Shirley Laska) were themselves residents of the area with vast preexisting knowledge and research experience on the Gulf and its adjacent wetlands. They Ó American Sociological Association 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0094306110386715 http://cs.sagepub.com HARVEY MOLOTCH New York University Harvey.molotch@nyu.edu Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow, by William R. Freudenburg, Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2009. 209pp. $26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781597266826. also had direct contact with the region’s academic engineering and science experts who had issued prior warnings and who were also present in the area as events unfolded. By piecing together the evidence, these sociologists (along with William Freudenburg who was early on the scene and Kai Erikson with, of course, a lifetime of relevant disaster knowledge) established what was to become the authoritative understanding of the human cause. Under the analysis of these authors, MRGO thus reveals much more than a waterway and its foibles. It had been built, the authors explain, as a boondoggle of the local growth machine whose leaders saw it as a way to use federal funds to subsidize shipping and industrial development. In fact, it did not do so because emerging shipping technologies made it, in the authors’ phrase, ‘‘obsolete on delivery’’ (p. 64). Requiring more earth removal than was used to build the Panama Canal (!), it also came to need annual dredging by the Corps of Engineers because wave action and other forces caused 657 Contemporary Sociology 39, 6
Page 1 and 2: Contemporary Sociology A JOURNAL OF
Page 3 and 4: CONTENTS 655 Editor’s Remarks The
Page 5 and 6: Author Title Reviewer 706 Paul Gilr
Page 7 and 8: Author Title 755 Michelle Brown The
Page 9: EDITOR’S REMARKS THE COURAGE TO P
Page 13 and 14: Written in a readily accessible sty
Page 15 and 16: when the disaster ‘‘agent’’
Page 17: Even as the nation makes what reall

Contemporary Sociology - American Sociological Association

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?