It's sometimes insightful but it seems to be written for a "young adult" reader and it seems to pander to the audience. I keep finding myself wishing it were better researched and better reasoned. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that such a popular book is so loaded with conventional wisdom and random assumptions presented as quasi-scientific.

What made me about apoplectic is that his fifth edition continues his inaccurate presentation of the Catherine Genovese myth despite that it has been widely discredited.

It's kind of disappointing. I'd recommend it to people as being worth reading but I strongly wish it were more academically rigorous. It's not nice to say but the guy comes across sometimes as kind of flaky and not that smart. Perhaps he's just as much of a chump when it comes to ideas as he says he is when it comes to complying with the requests of other people.

By the last couple of chapters I couldn't stand it anymore. I basically quickly skimmed them. The chapters on Authority and Scarcity are all over the place. The fifth edition, with its extensive editing, shouldn't be this sloppy. I think it would have been better if he had simply rewritten it because aside from all of the forced conclusions and so forth, the mixture of outdated references and haphazardly injected contemporary material feels schizophrenic.

It's hard not to dislike this guy just for his inane bio on the back cover as it is vomit-inducingly cutesy.