This book hauntingly summarised the Black Dahlia murder case.
There is a risk that a book summarising such a monumental story might get bogged down in dry, statistical detail.
Last year Jeffrey Grogger, at the University of Chicago, and Lynn Karoly, at the RAND Corporation, published a book summarising scores of studies of welfare reform, including nine that tried to gauge the role of the strong jobs market.
Tim Harris's conclusions from his 2006 book summarised the ambivalence of modern scholarship towards James II: In 2009, Steven Pincus confronted that scholarly ambivalence in 1688: The First Modern Revolution.
Which is very true, though this very book also summarises lots of research findings and the appropriate "lessons" to draw from them.
"If I have to summarise this book in one sentence, which would be very difficult," he says, "it is this: accept your contradictions.
It isn't really possible to summarise this book in this way, because its glory is in the detail, in its recording of facts and lives, atmospheres and words, quirks of feeling and behaviour.
Flush by Carl Hiaasen 304pp, Doubleday, £12.99 If I summarise this book, it will sound like something the Children's Film Foundation might come up with if Greenpeace had gone to them for some agitprop: a gambling mogul saves money by discharging toilet waste from his floating casino on to an unspoilt beach in Florida.
I argue this in my two 2009 books (summarised in my recent paper).
It is difficult to summarise what makes this book so appealing.
