{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023574386747371775, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002867155144950621, 'mean_word_length': 4.880149812734082, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: On the Fireline

ess of defining killing as murder is socially constructed. As a tenured professor with some years of experience teaching sociological courses in criminology and deviance, I am deeply grateful to Waters for providing such a valuable and accessible book in this endeavor. His writing is relatively free of sociological jargon, using everyday situations to point out how we tend to talk about and define murder (e.g., the supermarket checkout line as the modern-day “hangout” of the Durkheimian moral entrepreneurs). For the most part, the book eschews the use of quantitative data in making its points, relegating most statistics to an appendix. This is probably wise, given the emphasis on the human beings involved in killings and the situational nature of such incidents. Waters provides at the end of each of chapters 2-5 three case studies that do well in elaborating on and supporting the points made in the chapter; the same is done for the next two chapters. Each of these case studies is only a few pages, but taken together they contribute a great deal to this book’s appeal. For some students, the most difficult parts of the book may be the arguments made to the effect that, despite the fact that the rate of private killing is reduced with the development of a democratic state, state-sanctioned killing in the modern era has increased. In other words, vengeance is not yours, says the state to its citizens. The paradox is that the state must rely on its citizens to carry out killing on its behalf. This legally sanctioned killing is tied theoretically to the illegal killing discussed earlier in the book; the common thread being the idea that “individuals are violent in some contexts but not others.” (p. 196) Mustering a great deal of comparative-historical evidence to support this statement, Waters provides a strong contrapuntal argument to the prevailing psycho-legal tendency to view killers as fundamentally different from “us.” Although these ideas may be unsettling for some students, or at least novel to most, my guess is that most sociology instructors who decide to adopt this book will find that these assertions generate the most interesting discussion. I therefore recommend this book to instructors, but do so with two caveats in mind. First, Waters is not interested in theory-building, but rather, like Beeghley’s (2003) book, in helping us to understand the sociological significance of homicide as a social problem. A coherent theory of criminalization is not to be found here. Second, Waters leaves medical classifications of death and issues such as euthanasia and abortion unexplored. His concern is primarily with how the legal system defines murder, and how criminologists tend to be overly reliant on legal definitions in their research; however, there are many homicide researchers who have acknowledged this problem and have sought out national and international vital statistics data as an alternative. Overall, I couldn’t find much to criticize in this book. It would probably be most appropriate for undergraduate courses in deviance, criminology, or violence.