Deception : from ancient empires to Internet dating /

This quirky but wonderful book has one message: lies abound. Deception is everywhere and always has been. (Guess what! The Incas doctored their accounts as recorded by their knot record system, the khipu.) Harrington (Max Planck Institute, Germany) asked an interesting array of scientists and scholars from sociology, psychology, English, computer science, and cultural and mass media studies to write reflectively on the prevarications people routinely encounter or commit on an embarrassingly frequent basis. Though few people launch phishing expeditions on the Web to part innocent others from their privacy rights (and passwords), everyone engages in what the two trenchant authors of chapter 2, Frederick Schauer and Richard Zeckhauser (both, Harvard), call paltering. To palter is not exactly to tell a bald-faced lie, but neither is it to tell the whole truth. Paltering is the act of being insincere or a tad misleading--as, for example, when academics pad their vitae by listing the same professional talk several times using different titles. Ouch. This first-rate book belongs bedside and in any number of disciplinary seminars on deception. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. D. S. Dunn Moravian College