Book reviews / The Social Science Journal 41 (2004) 309–330 313 While this book is not meant to cover all aspects of global warming, this reviewer, as a policy analyst, would like to have seen more of a connection made between the science of weather and climate, and the “aberrations” in climate change, to policy decisions. The authors were diligent about showing us how climate change, related to floods and drought, affects people’s lives but failed to translate this into suggestions for policy decisions at the national and global level. The authors ask us to use the knowledge of a globally connected climate to make better technological decisions and to appreciate the relationship between ocean temperature and floods to better our lives. While this is important, policy makers can use the information presented in the book to make decisions to reduce the effects of global warming. A great strength of science is to inform the policy process. These links should be made whenever possible. This book is important because it furthers the knowledge and understanding of the rela- tionships between global climate and local weather events, such as floods and droughts, and their impact on people’s lives. Policy makers and scientists, as well as the general public, will benefit from this knowledge. Mary Brentwood Environmental Studies Department California State University, Sacramento CA 95819-6001, USA Tel.: +1-916-278-6620; fax: +1-916-278-7582 E-mail address: mary.brentwood@csus.edu doi: 10.1016/j.soscij.2004.01.013 The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social Sciences F.G. Bailey, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, 200 pages The Saving Lie is a book by an eminent anthropologist about a general philosophical problem. The social sciences are full of grand theories of human society, yet those theories, in the author’s view, are not strictly true. What, then, is their proper status? Such large theories, it is argued, are “saving lies.” They are theories that organize our thoughts about the social world and enable us to make sense of it. We cannot get work done without them. But they gloss over the actual complicated ways in which the social world really works. This is a book meant for anyone in any social science, since the status of abstract theories is a general problem that remains perennially unclear in the social sciences. After decades of theorizing about all manner of large and small problems in anthropology, F.G. Bailey, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, gives us his take on this general issue. Bailey focuses on two large important families of “saving lies” in the social sciences, those of neoclassical economics and those of structural functional anthropology. His aim is to show us the incompleteness of such totalizing theories. He believes, instead, that it is better to hold sev- eral theories of the social simultaneously, and keep them in constant dialogue with each other. The book is divided into three overall sections, with several chapters in each. The first section is devoted to the neoclassical economics paradigm. Bailey looks at the “pure” individualis-