THROUGH BLUE-TINTED GLASSES: My review of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture is in the 8/30 issue of the Weekly Standard. The online version is subscribers-only for now, but I’ll let you know if that changes.

I’m not thrilled with this review. I don’t think I quite nailed the problem(s) with the book. I don’t like doing negative reviews as a rule, and especially not negative reviews of work by people who have done good work–I don’t remember reading any non-“red vs. blue” writing from June Carbone, but I’ve read things by Naomi Cahn which I really liked–but this book is just not good. I’m right about the lack of qualitative data a.k.a. letting people from radically different worldviews speak, letting them explain themselves rather than being explained by those who are not complicit in their choices, but I don’t think I really explained the problem too well. I hope the review includes my praise for Cahn and Carbone’s criticism of the contemporary American economy; the whole book should have been just that stuff. But I guess then nobody would have read it.