The name of the book is The Culture Of Fear and it is by Barry Glassner.

The book, the Culture of Fear, is about eight fears and the final chapter contains the authors final thoughts. The eight fears are dubious dangers on roadways and campuses, crime in the news, youth at risk, monster moms, black men, smack is back, metaphoric illnesses, and plane wrecks. Each chapter goes into deep detail with tons of examples and statistics on everything Glassner talks about, thus validating everything he says. The book was published in 1999 so all these examples are old but he released an updated 10 year anniversary book in 2010. Within the book though he mentions alot on how the media says one thing when really its another. They make statistics sound super high by just saying that something got 50% worse when really it could've went from 10% to 15%, technically it did go up 50% but when someone only says 50% it seems way higher. Pretty much the moral of it all is do research if you want to know the truth don't just take one persons word for it.

His name is Barry Glassner. He spent a long five years writing this book. Whenever he got done with a draft of a chapter his wife would be the one who revised it. He not only conducted years of research but he talked with numerous people when writing this book, all giving him more and more ideas for it.

There are a total of nine chapters. Each chapter talks about a different fear in America, like crime in the news, youth at risk, black men, plane wrecks and many other ones. Within each chapter there are sub categories in which he talks about percentages and examples associated with that fear. In the back he has a full 48 pages worth of work cited. Last he has an index in the back of the book in which contains all the examples he used.

In the book the author talks in a serious and formal tone because he thinks that these are actual problems Americans are facing and he wants others to realize them and to take it seriously before they get worse.

Barry Glassner uses a high level of vocabulary throughout his book, the culture of fear, because he wants to show people that he is serious about his topic. He doesn't want people to take this as a children's book instead as an eye-opener to the country.

One fact is that the media tends to exaggerate a lot of statistics, like between 1994-1995 it was reported that 2.2 million people are attacked on the job, murder was the 3rd leading cause for men and 1st for women in work related deaths, but Erik Larson found that only 1,000 are murdered a year which is a 1 in 114,000 ratio. Another is that teenage birth rate has dropped by almost 12 percent from it's highest in the 1950s, when people actually make it seem that its at an all time high now.

In the book everything is organized into sections. Lets just take chapter 6 for an example. It is called "SMACK IS BACK" When Presidents and the Press Collude, the Scares Never Stop. We know immediately that the chapter is going to talk about the president and the press working together. Within the chapters there are subcategories which also tells us what the next few pages will be about. An example would be the first subsection "A White House Tradition." The title tells us the something is happening in the white house every so often, and if you read the section you would learn that ever since Nixon's campaign, each president used drugs as a way to get votes and that even TV shows started to have anitdrug themes since then.

My favorite chapter would be chapter 2 crime in the news. It's my favorite because I learned a good amount from it. Like when statistics come out the news tend not to say the actual percentage but instead just how much it changed. It was also a very informative chapter about how the media likes to handle its stories, which made the rest of the chapters more clear when they talked about the media. I also learned that because there are so many news channels so many crime stories become televised thus more and more people are thinking that crime is really high right now when actually its not that much different than before, we now are able to hear them all.

I would definitely put this down as a must read for everyone. Not only does Barry Glassner show major fears that we as Americans can relate to, but he has actual proof as to why we shouldn't be worrying as much as we are. He includes the real statistics about things instead of the media that shows part of it. The best part of it all is that he cited everything so in case someone may not believe him on something all they need to do is look in the back of the book, find his source, and look it up. In the end if you just want to live with a little less fear, this book will help you.