| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Joanna Bourke. Fear: A Cultural History. Emeryville, Calif.: Shoemaker and Hoard. 2005. Pp. xii, 500. $27.00.

The author of any single-volume cultural history of fear must inevitably face some tough decisions about what to leave out, since a large part of the appeal of fear as subject for cultural historians is its ubiquity across the entire range of human experiences. Joanna Bourke has restricted her account to the English-speaking world and to the last two centuries. But she has also limited herself to studying only certain kinds of fears, which fall, broadly speaking, under two headings. First, she is interested in fears that have an essentially democratic quality, in that they affect all human beings regardless of their personal or social circumstances: these include the fear of death, of pain, and of disease, as well as nightmares, to which we are all vulnerable. Second, she is concerned with particular moments of heightened fear, whether in the form of what she calls "moral panics" or in response to natural or unforeseen disasters. The book as a whole is an attempt to connect these two kinds of fear: the fears we cannot avoid with the fears that we have more or less invented for ourselves.

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