Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life

Truth Spots is a compelling book on an entirely original topic in sociology. Beautifully written, it is fashioned after a travelogue, where each stop is a “truth spot,” or a place that “makes people believe.” It offers a fascinating tour, albeit one that ends perhaps a bit too soon. Upon arriving at the book’s final epigraph, “Veritas Filia Loci” (Truth is the Daughter of Place), you may find that you would have liked to visit even more truth spots. The book’s author, Thomas Gieryn, is one of sociology’s most perceptive observers when it comes to the material and cultural dimensions of place. If he has led us to recognize the truth spots around us, Gieryn suggests in closing, then his job here is done. The book clearly succeeds by this criterion. Truth Spots is an eye-opening contribution, and is full of consequence for how urban sociologists perceive and interpret the places we study. Gieryn’s agenda is to explore a series of locations that confer validity or authenticity to the claims of social actors, but that do so in very different ways. In the first chapter, which doubles as an introduction, we abruptly find ourselves at the ancient oracle in Delphi, Greece. Gieryn peels back layers of history and artifice to show how archeologists and historians have “manufactured” the truth through Delphi’s ruins, defining the location as a place where ancient Greeks came to communicate with the Gods. Believe it (or not), his next “truth spot” is Walden Pond (Chapter 2), followed by a series of case studies that include the Potemkin Villages created by Henry Ford (Chapter 4), a courthouse in St. Louis (Chapter 6), and a scientific laboratory at the University of Indiana where ancient nickel deposits are analyzed (Chapter 8). To move through such a wildly varying itinerary of places without losing the reader requires a great degree of writerly skill, and Gieryn is up to the task. Like the book’s topic, Gieryn is one-of-a-kind, a sociologist whose lyrical, descriptive prose is laced with sharp analytical clarity. In short, he’s a stimulating tour guide — a combination of curiosity and novel insight propels this book forward on its whirlwind voyage across centuries and around the globe. The diversity of case studies in the book provides a payoff for Gieryn, giving him a great degree of analytical leverage, but he wields it with an abundance of caution and nuance. (Arguably too much of the former — more on that later.) The descriptions of the places profiled in the book are deeply sociological, and invite the reader to indulge in some deep theorizing along the way. Gieryn, however, declines to extrapolate from his cases till the end of the book where, in a theoretical “coda,” he finally provides some general answers to the question framed by the running title. Places make people believe