A Culture of Second Chances: The Promise, Practice, and Price of Starting Over in Everyday Life by David M. Newman (review)

Academic life is full of disappointments. Manuscripts are rejected. Grants do not come through. Lectures fall flat. Co-authors flake out. Students with great potential never bloom. Promotions are denied. Genial interviews yield no job offer.

If we wanted to study disappointments in a serious way, we might keep collecting examples and try to see what they have in common. Perhaps in every case, there is a gap between expectations and actuality; yet, it might turn out that the gaps vary in ways that suggest the need for a typology of disappointments. Eventually, we might be able to distinguish one kind of disappointment from another and say something about the conditions under which each kind occurs. Figuring this out would be a fair piece of analytic work.

Life is also full of second chances, as David Newman demonstrates in his book A Culture of Second Chances. The book abounds with examples, leaving no doubt that second chances, or things we might loosely construe as second chances, are ubiquitous (as Newman says) in spiritual, legal, romantic, physical, educational, and commercial realms of life. Newman's impressive cataloging of examples is testament to the truth of C. Wright Mills's observation that you do not really have to study a topic you are working on, because "once you are into it, it is everywhere."

The examples of second chances that Newman musters include migration, the G.I. Bill, drug rehabilitation, plastic surgery, reincarnation, deferred prosecution of corporations, remarriage, fertility treatments, organ transplants, GED programs, bands covering the songs of other bands, film remakes, and sports comebacks. That is a diverse lot to throw in the hopper, and one might wonder if it is really all the same kind of stuff. Yet it is hard, in the face of all these examples, to disagree with the claim that ours is a culture that loves second chances, although perhaps not for everyone on all occasions.

Newman tries to sort matters out by offering a theory of second chances. He argues that second chances hinge on judgments of deservingness, involve relationships and organizations, and often lead to changes in identity. All this seems true enough if a bit pedestrian; but still a promising step toward making sense of second chances. One quibble is that this modest scheme is put forth early (chapter 2) and little used thereafter. What we get, in subsequent chapters, is a piling on of examples of what Newman considers second chances (see above). What is missing is an account of what these examples have in common and of how the author's theory illuminates some dynamic at their core.

Newman himself seems to recognize the problem. He admits that "there are so many variations on the theme of second chances that it is difficult to identify a common pattern or process" (p. 56). That admission implies that there is still analytic work to be done. These are, after all, the author's chosen examples; no one else put them in the second-chance basket. Do they belong there or not? It seems that reliance on the folk concept "second chance" has led to insufficiently discriminate lumping. If it is hard to see a common pattern or process, that is a clue that there might be too much different stuff in the basket.

After convincing us that second chances are everywhere, Newman, in the last two chapters, tells us where they are not. Here, Newman begins to explore the conditions under which people get second chances and the conditions under which they do not. He also considers how power and privilege produce an unequal distribution of second chances. This is the best sociology in the book. It seems to me that in these final chapters Newman finds, albeit late in the day, a potentially fruitful path to a more robust theory of second...