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A review by librarianonparade
Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People by Charlie Campbell
2.0
The premise for this book had real potential, but the execution was decidedly lacking. A book about scapegoating throughout history, about all the ways humanity has found to blame others for its faults, about the ways in which groups and individuals have been ostracised and exiled, made to be 'other'...there is so much rich ground to cover there, so much depth and psychology to explore. This book could have been a thousand pages long, two thousand pages. The fact that it's barely 200 pages including notes tells a lot.
It's superficial, at best. How in a book about scapegoating you can gloss over something like Antisemitism in scarcely more than four or five pages is beyond me. Each chapter covers a single topic - witch-hunts, communism, Jesus Christ, conspiracy theories, even animals - but there's so little depth to it that I was wanting more on almost every page and being left disappointed. If this had been part of the 'Short Histories' series I could understand it, but I can't help but feel if you're not going to do the topic justice there's little point in writing a book like this. It boils down incredibly complex historical events and psychological impulses to the most basic, simplistic level - if only history and humanity was so simple.
It's superficial, at best. How in a book about scapegoating you can gloss over something like Antisemitism in scarcely more than four or five pages is beyond me. Each chapter covers a single topic - witch-hunts, communism, Jesus Christ, conspiracy theories, even animals - but there's so little depth to it that I was wanting more on almost every page and being left disappointed. If this had been part of the 'Short Histories' series I could understand it, but I can't help but feel if you're not going to do the topic justice there's little point in writing a book like this. It boils down incredibly complex historical events and psychological impulses to the most basic, simplistic level - if only history and humanity was so simple.