Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial.

• Author: Vivian, Bradford
• Position: Book Reviews

Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial. By Gary Alan Fine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp. 262. $19.00 paper.

The lesson of Gary Alan Fine's Difficult Reputations can be phrased quite simply: reputation matters. Reputation, as Fine would have it, refers not simply to personality, but "constitutes a moral gestalt" (2). Indeed, "reputations are collective representations enacted in relationships," Fine continues. "A reputation is not the opinion that one individual forms of another; rather, it is a shared, established image. Reputations are embedded within social relations, and as a consequence, reputation is connected to the forms of communication embedded within a community" (3). Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial presents eight case studies that attempt to account for the various conditions that give rise to particular reputations, the values they symbolize, and the social investments they serve.

Although Fine is a sociologist, those in communication and rhetorical studies will find much of value in Difficult Reputations. Fine's insistence that reputation acquires significance through its rhetorical figuration and social communication requires little conceptual translation for our discipline. One would hardly be inaccurate in describing Fine's book as a study of ethos, albeit a particular kind of ethos--that of "difficult" reputations.

The significance of such reputations, Fine claims, has been ignored in previous studies, which "have generally examined figures who are treated as heroic or as moral exemplars." Fine is concerned "not with those who have stable and positive reputations, but with people whose reputations have not been solidified in such complimentary terms: those figures who are tarnished with what I label difficult reputation? (10). Like their moral counterparts, "the reputations of villains and deviants help to establish the boundaries of society" (8).

Fine's especially cogent introduction establishes the social significance of reputation and outlines his methodology. Fine explains that his studies are devoted to historical reputations. "When we recall the past," he writes, "we often highlight individuals," particularly the way a given individual "serves as a synecdoche; he or she stands for a historical period or set of events" (6-7). In this frame, "Images of public figures are used in an attempt to teach citizens...