Disappointing both the book and ultimately, the bloke.

First the book: with a 400 page biog of an academic it's perhaps inevitable that we are immersed in review boards, grant applications, funding proposals, hassles over tenure, but it makes for boggy reading. Treatment of the Obedience experiment is fairly lengthy,though much of it is little more than transcript quotes; discussion focusses mainly on the ethical issues, which have also given me some pause. Bruno Bettelheim, another of those mendacious pseudo-gurus, must parade in the halls of infamy with his comment that the Obedience experiment is in line with the worst Nazi excesses. On that analogy the SS camp commandants would have paid their Jewish victims a modest fee for volunteering, offered to close the gas taps if they didn't like it, and sent them a questionnaire about their experience a few months after their deaths.

Milligram is quite a cocky character with a warm prose style and an easy humour, but his life is in fact rather narrow. If i may make the comparison, the life of my tutor Z Pelczynski spans universes (Polish resistance, rebuilding Eastern Europe) that Milgram dreamt not of. The O- experiments were a good piece of theatre, but told the world little we haven't known since Thomas Hobbes or Genghis Khan - homo homine lupus. The six degrees experiment is given little space, but we read that half the letters didn't arrive at all, so the conclusion seems to be "some of us are only six steps away - the rest, quien sabe?"

The title is another publisher's hyperbole. "shocked the world"? Save that for Harold Shipman, or that mild-faced optician down in Syria. ( )

Interesting to read more about Milgram and the ground-breaking social psychology experiments he did in the sixties. He's probably best-known for the "obedience studies" (one person supposedly administering electric shocks to another under the supervision of an authority figure) and the "small worlds" studies (aka the "six degrees of separation" for linking one person to another). There was good coverage of the obedience work, but in my opinion, the small worlds work got very little notice in the book. I would like to have seen more on that, since social media and web2.0 are such hot topics currently. One more note - I was somewhat surprised by the repeated discussion of the ethics of the various experiments. Milgram was the focus for a lot of ethical controversy surrounding the obedience work. To his credit, he was one of the first in the field to have an a priori, well-reasoned perspective on the ethical aspects of the experiments. Nevertheless, there was still much controversy. ( )