never quite as they at first seemed in our ‘ideological commonplaces’, whether those be traditional or progressive, radical or conservative, politically correct or incorrect. This Žižek book too, then, includes a wealth of insights (an overabundance, more like). One of the more striking ones (in my opinion at least) is to be found in Žižek’s statement about, and indeed plea to ‘withdraw’. In an age when both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ violence and counter-violence abound in vicious spirals, ‘doing nothing’ might, just might, be the most radical, the most violent thing to do. That would indeed, I believe, very seriously, and very violently, undermine violence. Or would it? Perhaps not … Eamonn Carrabine Crime, Culture and the Media Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008. pp. 234. £16.99. ISBN 0745634664. • Reviewed by Majid Yar, University of Hull, UK It must be noted at the outset that Eamonn Carrabine’s new book comprises something of a distinctively British enterprise, insofar as its framing of crime and media scholarship is situated largely within the trajectory of ‘domestic’ debates and developments in criminology and its cognate disciplines. In the UK the social scientific study of mediated representations of crime was for many years led by contributions from sociology, especially those critical and reflexive endeavours built upon a reading of American labelling and sub-cultural perspectives, com- bined with a resurgent academic interest in Marxism. From the mid-1970s onwards, the ‘baton’ was taken up by the newly constituted field of critical cultural studies (exemplified in the UK, of course, by the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). It is only in the past couple of decades, as crim- inology has become institutionalized as a field of academic inquiry with its own unique identity, that the study of crime and culture has incrementally found a home within its self-defined ambit. Carrabine’s formulation of criminology’s analytical, theoretical and substantive concerns in respect to media and culture not only reflects and refracts this inter-disciplinary history, but also seeks to amend and update its more restrictive elements. The first part of the book incisively reconstructs criminology’s dominant modes of engagement with culture and media. He explores, first, the ways in which the paradigmatic concerns of ‘media effects’ (imported variously from psychology, mass communications theory and the sociology of ‘moral panics’) sought to formulate causal hypotheses of media ‘manipulation’ and ideological conditioning. Second, he offers an equally incisive reconstruction of the way in which discussion of media has been implicated in debates around ‘fear of crime’ and the putative social production of fear via the mass media. Carrabine offers an astute critical analysis of these aforementioned debates, highlighting a per- sistent tendency in criminology (yet to be wholly eradicated, alas) to view mean- ings as monolithic and subjects as passive receivers of mass-mediated messages. Book reviews 411