Epistemographer

Today, the 3rd-ever Virtual Book Tour sets up shop here, thanks to the efforts of maestro Kevin Smokler. The book on the agenda is Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes, and if you don’t have a copy and want one you can order it here. Welcome to anybody who’s new on the tour – if you haven’t already, you might check out the posts from Monday and Tuesday.

So, here’s the weird thing about taking part in a Virtual Book Tour – it seems that the general norms of blogging entail commenting on something and linking to it so that the reader can read your comments, read the original, then come back to your comments in an essentially frictionless process. In this case, however, I’m writing about something which by definition you haven’t read, and which you’ll have to buy and read over a period of days if not weeks in order to see for yourself what you think (if, after reading my thoughts, you want to at all). On the other hand, I don’t want to just write a generic review, ‘cause that’s not embracing the medium of the blog.

So, here’s what we’ll do: first, I’ll post my take on the book without too much exposition of its contents, then in another post I’ll talk about how the book resonated with my own experiences. I’ve set up an account for Ethan Watters, so he might show up at some point with a response and his own thoughts. Comments are, of course, heartily encouraged…

…and, we’re off!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2003 at 12:15 am and is filed under Virtual Book Tour: Urban Tribes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.