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The Character of Harms: Operational Challenges in Control, by Malcolm K. Sparrow. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 264 pp. $32.99 cloth. ISBN: 9780521872102.
In this book, Malcolm Sparrow establishes a model for the reduction of various harms that confront the world today. The work is specifically focused on the operational challenges practitioners face in controlling harms. Rather than trying to develop a theoretical and for policy-oriented perspective on the regulatory strategies to promote goods, such as safety, security, and well-being, Sparrow seeks to suggest ways to sabotage harms. The harms of Sparrow's work are of multiple kinds indeed, including problems associated with hunger, war, genocide, terrorism, crime, and environmental problems, amongst others. The suggested model is focused at tackling harms by developing a method to pick important problems and find ways to fix them head-on. Ideally, the model would be applied within various agencies involved with harm-reduction to more adequately fulfill their respective missions.
Sparrow develops his arguments for an approach to sabotage harms from an analysis of prior methodologies dealing with harms, such as terrorist attacks, diseases, and poverty. From an organizational viewpoint, this focus implies that harm-reduction agencies would have to develop specific...