Preview copy of a review to appear in the journal Critical Criminologist (DOI: 10.1007/s10612-013-9173-8). The final publication is available at link.springer.com Jock Young. The Criminological Imagination. Polity Press, Malden, MA, 2011, 252pp. Kevin Karpiak Eastern Michigan University Jock Young’s The Criminological Imagination is the last in a trilogy of books that explore the nature of othering in the contemporary world. Where the first of these, The Exclusive Society (1999), examined the mechanisms of exclusion in late modern society and the second, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007), traced these very exclusions to the insecurities which bedevil our time, this final book aims to highlight how the forms of othering described in the first two books are paralleled within the social sciences. In so doing, Young offers a full-frontal jeremiad against a positivist criminology that covers its lack of imagination, relevance or inspiration with sophistry disguised as arcane mathematics and disingenuous realist pragmatism. What is needed instead, Young argues, is a critical criminology able to offer us the tools with which to understand our lives and the world in which we live, an ideal only achievable through navigating between the Scylla of Abstracted Empiricism and the Charybdis of Grand Theory. In the process Young writes a book that will prove essential reading for students and scholars interested in expanding the scope of criminology, and indeed the social sciences, to include a broader inquiry into the nature of human existence. However if readers approach the text as a comprehensive attempt to explain crime patterns or an analysis of the efficacy of security techniques, they may be disappointed. For this is a book not so much of criminological discourse but about it. In fact one might be tempted to describe its point of departure as an opening volley in a nascent anthropology of criminology. Ultimately, this ingenious shift in perspective serves as the book’s greatest strength at the same time that it moors it in an entirely new set of difficulties. The first part of the book consists of a masterful, vamping evisceration of the type of positivist quantitative criminology that, in Young’s estimation, lacks imagination, curiosity and a full sense of human lives at the same time that it smugly offers meaningless research whose inutility and inanity is hid only by the extraordinary efforts undertaken to obfuscate the basis of their claims. The highlight of this romp is a tour de force deconstruction of an article taken from the flagship journal Criminology (Cohen, Gorr, and Singh 2003), in which Young demonstrates the layers of pseudo-scientific technical babble cloaking a Dzdense text and thin narrativedz that is so Dzfragile and unsubstantialdz that, at base, its central discovery is that public- initiated 911 drug related calls originating from bars tend to decrease during the