Race Hate; Religious Extremism

Here are two books, each as welcome as the wet weekend on which their review was first attempted. Part of a publisher’s series which also contains Drugs on the Street and Violence on the Screen , they seek to portray and explain the hows, whys and wherefores behind their subjects and to offer readers the chance of understanding them. Or do they? – it’s not clear from the way the text is assembled. For in each one what we get is spread after spread of arbitrarily selected sound bites (the voices, one supposes) aimed at illustrating arbitrarily facets of their burdens. So, in Religious Extremism , we learn that among other things the Koran, homosexuality, abortion and the New Testament all are seen by some as worth killing for – examples being given, illustrated by often unnecessarily ‘arted-up’ photographs. Race Hate follows the same dismal pattern. There’s nothing here that one could willingly attribute to an author – just a battery of quotes ripe for lifting off the page and into the files of students, most of whom could use the world-wide-web to do as competent a scissors-and-paste job as the assemblers of these two.