Yet more book reviews

Amazon has now deleted the first two of the three Lott reviews of Targeting Guns and edited the third one to remove the praise of Lott. However, while they deleted two, I found three more of his self-reviews. I've put all of his reviews together on this page. It's an impressive body of work, with eighteen five-star reviews of his own books and ten anonymous pans of rival's books.

Two of the newly discovered reviews aren't very interesting---they just repeat stuff about how wonderful Lott's book is, but this one is almost poignant:

Powerful book that sets the standard for academic research, April 19, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from USA

Few books have had their conclusions evaluated as closely and carefully as this book. Academic after academic has replicated his results, and since he has made his data available to others many have examined to see how sensitive to including other variables to explain whether the crime rate declines after shall issue concealed handgun laws are adopted. The data has been re-examined by academics at many universities and has survived remarkably well. The fact that Lott can write so well and clearly and that his findings can be understood by a large audience only helps explain why gun control advocates attack him so viciously.

This classic has stood the test of time.

You see, on April 18, Ayres and Donohue's paper was published. They re-examined the data and Lott's thesis did not survive "the test of time". Lott reacted with an anonymous review declaring that it had. Sad.

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Tim, You may be interested in this: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/3798.html. I'd have sent it to you via e-mail, but every time I attempt to e-mail you it is bounced back to me for some reason.

By Ralph E. Luker (not verified) on 27 Feb 2004 #permalink