ttj - Tom Jones

At the risk of saying something very general, the late Christopher Booker used to love generalising the dynamics of phenomena into general forms with identified phases. For archetypal stories, depending on which, this may include a dream stage, and a frustration stage, and so on, for example.  Groupthink instances (in a book finished by collaborator Richard North, also coauthor of the book reviewed here) also shared a structure, having similar phases to each other.   And scares, too, have their structure, with their phases. Scared To Death pulls together a bag of seemingly-unrelated episodes, and presents each one with the following commonalities: the authors, between them, are knowledgeable about it, and the episode had the dynamic of a scare, in the particular sense defined by the authors in the book. I never thought I would be interested to read about the food poisoning scandals of eighties Britain, but my attention was held by this and many other topics. It is over a ...