I'm halfway through reading Popular Crime, Bill James branching out and writing about something other than baseball.
It is an interesting book; from the reviews I read I wasn't sure it would be good but I think a number of reviewers tended to take him literally when he was speaking more in a speculative way, trying to reason through things in the same inimitable style that made the Baseball Abstracts so great. I think the negative reviews had more to do with the reviewers expecting something else, as opposed to the book being dull and uninteresting.
The book certainly could have been improved by better editing, as there are occasional (frequent?) rants that I could do without, and way too many uses of the phrase "In my view..." His resentment towards experts on the criminal justice system, whether academics or lawyers, gets old after the first couple of rants. But on the whole, it is an interesting read, and his hypotheses and conclusions (whether crackpot or not) are generally thought-provoking.
I am guessing that since Bill James wrote it, others here have read it. What did people think?