Accid Anal. & Prey. Vol. 12, pp. 313-320 Pergamon Press Ltd., 1980. Printed in Great Britain

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Accident Analysis and Prevention invites authors and publishers to submit material for presen- tation in Recent Publications. Books, conference proceedings, research reports and other full-length studies are welcome.

Persons wishing to review publications for the journal are encouraged to submit their name, address and areas of interest.

All publications and inquiries should be directed to:

Jane C. Stutts, Book Review Editor UNC Highway Safety Research Center C.T.P. 197A Chapel Hill, NC 27514, U.S.A.

Seasons of Shame: The New Violence in Sports. Robert C. Yeager. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1980. 272 pp. $12.95.

Because it deals with injuries and fatalities resulting from athletic competition, some readers may approach this book in the hope of discovering some insights that are applicable to accidental injuries of all types. At first glance, they will be disappointed. Yeager's basic thesis is that the numerous and severe injuries he describes are not accidental but deliberate--a predictable outcome of a spirit of violence which, he argues, is escalating at all levels of competitive contact sports, from professional football teams down through high school games to the Little League and Pop Martin eight-year-oids.

As a straightforward account of the trauma produced by competitive sports, the book is convincing. It is also frightening if one accepts Yeager's contention that most of the fatalities and permanently disabling injuries incurred in football, basketball, and ice hockey result from premeditated assault which is intended to remove the victim from the game and which occurs either at the urging or with the implied consent of overzealous coaches. Yeager concludes-- rather obviously in view of his data--that the fun has gone out of competitive sports, and along with it any sense of sportsmanship.

A basic weakness of the book stems not from any deficiency of the author but from the total lack of trustworthy statistics on the number, type, and severity of athletic injuries. Lacking epidemiological data, Yeager is forced to rely on case histories, and his use of large numbers of them to strengthen his argument has the occasional effect of numbing the reader rather than convincing him. In addition to case histories, the book abounds with enumerations of injuries and fatalities, but nowhere will the critical reader find even an estimate of the populations at risk.

Nevertheless, given the limitations of the data, Yeager, an investigative reporter, demonstrates in the documentation that follows each of his chapters that he has done his homework conscientiously--even though the only texts available to him are deficient in one respect or another. He is not above citing sensational cases (the high school coach who showed his team how tough he was by biting the heads off live frogs, or the umpire at an amateur baseball game who was forced to draw a gun to protect himself against the team that disagreed with one of his decisions), but generally his tone is temperate and he allows the facts to speak for themselves.

Yeager's discussion of the etiology of violence among participants and among spectators, however, is vague and confusing, perhaps because it attempts to be eclectic. In a chapter tracing the history of competitive athletics since the Roman gladiatorial contests, he seems to imply that a taste for violence may be genetically based. Elsewhere he blames television both for stimulating the public's taste for violence and for motivating violent behavior in those professional teams whose main source of revenue is television broadcast rights. In another context he speculates that competitive sports may be the only area in our increasingly

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bureaucratized and routinized society in which the participants (and the spectators vicariously) can satisfy their need to experience risk and danger. In still another he argues that the media tend to publicize the more aggressive professional players, who therefore serve as role models for younger amateurs. All of these explanations are tentative, undocumented, and to some extent contradictory.

As I noted at the outset, the reader who is concerned with the etiology or the prevention of accidents of various types is not likely to find in Seasons of Shame anything immediately applicable. Yet several points that Yeager raises may stimulate such a reader's thinking. For example:

On the issue of unanticipated consequences of injury countermeasures, Yeager argues that the hard plastic football helmet, introduced as a protective measure, has come to be used as an assaultive weapon and produces more injuries than it prevents.

If, as Yeager contends, television stresses and stimulates violent behavior, is the prevalence of automobile chases on television programs related to the recently noted increase in vehicular assault in many areas of the United States?

If high school football coaches are as bitterly competitive as Yeager claims they are, do they undergo complete personality changes when, at the end of the football season, they change roles and teach driver education?

If the bureaucratization of our society and the routinization of work have left sports as the only arena in which the individual can experience risk, is there a systematic relationship between the level of routinization of an individual's occupation and his need to expose himself to recreational risks?

It is issues such as these that make Seasons of Shame worth reading. It is worth reading, too, as a model of responsible popularization of a significant public-health problem--a book that communicates to a broad general audience without descending to sensationalism or to a Readers Digest level of oversimplification.

DAVID KLEIN

Department of Social Science Michigan State University

Development of Breakaway Utility Poles. J. C. Fox, M. C. Good and P. N. Joubert. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Melbourne. Department of Transport, Office of Road Safety, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1979. 169 pp.

This report describes a detailed Australian investigation concerning the problem of roadside timber utility poles as they present a potential fixed object hazard to errant passenger vehicles. The authors' primary objective is to develop a safety upgrading retrofit or breakaway concept which can be implemented on existing timber utility poles. The report is fundamentally divided into three sections. The first is a clear and detailed review of earlier and on-going research efforts to minimize the hazard associated with roadside timber poles. The second and third sections of the text describe the authors' efforts to address this fundamental roadside problem for the particular needs of Australia. These main sections of the report involve a parametric investiga- tion using simple analytical modeling of vehicle-utility pole collisions as well as extensive scale model testing. Based on the findings from these analyses, a retrofit or breakaway concept for timber poles is presented which Fox et al. believe has a high potential of reducing the roadside hazard of in situ timber poles while maintaining satisfactory structural strength; the latter to prevent environmental failures due to wind imposed forces on the supportive service lines.

The state of the art review of breakaway timber pole research efforts by Michie and Wolfe (1973) and Labra (1977) is well documented in the text. An important aspect which is not alluded to is that the pendulum tests performed by Michie and Wolfe (1973) to simulate the dynamic response of timber poles to vehicular impact, involved a rigid impact mass. This factor put significant limitations on the studies' findings. In Labra (1977), however, an aluminum honey-