Book Review: Anatomy of a false confession: The interrogation and conviction of Brendan Dassey

• Author: Lee E. Ayers-Preboski
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016819871993
• Published date: 01 June 2023
• Date: 01 June 2023

wind up bringing metal to the recycling centers that buy used metal. These places allowed Stickle to

find his subjects. Some people refused to talk but others were more forthcoming, and his book con-

tains brief profiles of some of the people he interviewed as well as color photographs that illustrate

various aspects of his topic.

In short, this book’s contribution is substantive. It is the first ethnography to explore metal thieves

and their crimes. It originated as a dissertation project, and the book bears a strong resemblance to the

dissertation. This is a reflection of a trend in publishing, whereby publishers offer junior scholars

opportunities to publish their revised dissertations as books early in their careers. Typically, these

manuscripts receive minimal editorial attention; often the author is responsible for formatting the

manusript according to a set of standards that make it easy to typeset. In general, copies are

priced around US$100 and printed individually when they are ordered, with the expectation that

they will be sold primarily to libraries.

What tends to get lost in this process is scholarly publishing’s traditional emphasis on theoretical

contributions. It is all very well to write about a substantive topic that has been neglected—to write

the first book on a topic. But readers have the right to ask “So what?”to ask what the book adds to our

understanding beyond the confines of the book’s topic. And so, we might ask how knowing about the

lives of scrappers and metal thieves increases our larger understanding of criminology: How are the

substantive findings related to bigger issues?

One possible answer would be to locate metal theft within the literature on property crime. While

Sickle refers to a few familiar concepts (Matza on drift, Sykes and Matza on techniques of neutral-

ization), there are many other conceptual roads not taken, such as more systematically examining

metal theft’s social organization, or comparing it to other forms of deviant work. A second approach

might consider scrapping and metal theft as a very literal instances of what Hughes called dirty work

—ways of disposing of refuse. At the lower end of the scrapping hierarchy, Stickle finds people who

have very little, trying to make something from what no one else wants. In India, this is work per-

formed by Dalits; here, untouchability may lack a theological rationale, but the management of waste

is an issue that all societies prefer not to face. A third issue, which Stickle does say a bit about, is the

role of the recycling industry in supporting metal theft by turning a blind eye to nature of the mate-

rials they buy.

In other words, this book delivers some interesting information, but the reader winds up wishing

that the topic had been explored a bit further.

ORCID iD

Joel Best https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6050-9840

Cicchini, M. (2018). Anatomy of a false confession: The interrogation and conviction of Brendan Dassey. Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 238 pp. $32.00. ISBN: 978-1-5381-1715-6.

Reviewed by: Lee E. Ayers-Preboski ,Southern Oregon University, Ashland, OR, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016819871993

Author Michael D. Cicchini is a practicing defense attorney in Wisconsin. Cicchini takes

the reader through the process of a true crime framework and what is also the basis for the

Netflix documentary Making of a Murder. The shortfalls of the American Criminal Justice

System are blasted. The book, broken into seven parts, starts with a disclaimer “independent

and unauthorized exploration of the legal, evidentiary, and ethical issues in the court cases of

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