From the Book Review Editor

With this issue's review symposium, I decided to break a rule that has remained fairly constant in the Social Forces book review: not reviewing new editions of old books. That rule serves several purposes, not the least of which is to maintain space for the new research emerging. We discard upwards of 90 percent of the books we receive for review, so "one and done" seems an appropriate policy.

But then we got the second edition of Charles Bosk's classic, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure, in the mail. In it, Professor Bosk offers important new information and an appendix that could be seen as providing an entirely new interpretive frame for the book. Given Forgive and Remember's classic status in several subfields and the new intellectual content in the second edition, I decided to offer a review symposium.

In this symposium, we present three views on the revised edition. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good (Harvard University, Department of Social Medicine) and Peter Conrad (Brandeis University) offer commentary on the changes themselves, both from perspectives as medical sociologists familiar with the book and its impact. For a fresh perspective, I turned to Amy Weil, M.D. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Department of Internal Medicine), whose approach considers the book in its entirety — and on its first read.