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The Crisis Manager: Facing Risk and Responsibility, Otto Lerbinger, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc., 10 Industrial Ave., Mahwah, NJ 07430, 384 pp., softcover $36, hardcover $79.95.
Reviewed by William C. Adams, APR, Fellow PRSA
Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Florida International University
When long-time educator Otto Lerbinger tells us in his new book, The Crisis Manager: Facing Risk and Responsibility, that ours is a "crisis society," we don't doubt it for a Texaco/Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid/America On-Line/TWA/ValuJet minute. Fact is, even as the Boston University professor's book came rolling off the presses, new crises were enveloping us almost daily, ranging from global (Swiss banks and Holocaust survivors, Wal-Mart and Cuban-made pajamas) to local (the "deer population blight" affecting many cities, athletes engaging in unsavory on-and-off field antics).
*ITEM: A study has shown fully one-half of all reported major world industrial accidents from 1900 to 1988 occurred in the last eight of those 88 years.
*ITEM: The lead story in a weekly public relations newsletter reported on a new study of Fortune 1000 companies showing 86% of senior executives consider crisis management "very important."
*ITEM: A recent issue of PRSA's monthly TACTICS newsletter was literally given over to...