What makes Americans fearful? Is it the War in Iraq? The possibility of another terrorist attack? The rising costs of healthcare? Cellular phones? Gay and lesbian couples? Are these fears at all warranted?.

             Authors Barry Glassner and Arlene Stein both agree that Americans are an increasingly fearful people. They concentrate on different fears and have vastly different research and writing styles. However, they also agree that majority of these fears are blown far out of proportion. They also both argue that these fears continue to be propagated, to serve the vested interests of social elites.

             This book compares and contrasts Glassner's The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things and Stein's The Stranger Next Door. The first part of this paper examines Glassner's use of case studies to address American fears such as "Killer Kids," "Monster Moms" and "Black Men." This paper then evaluates Glassner's assertion that these unfounded fears are integral to understanding dysfunction in American society.

             The next part of this paper then looks at Stein's The Stranger Next Door, an engaging read about how a small working-class town in Oregon became ground zero in the battle between homosexual rights activists and evangelical Christians. This paper then evaluates Stein's analysis regarding how the Timbertown residents came to both loathe and fear its few homosexual residents.

             In the conclusion, this paper compares and contrasts their two approaches. It finds that while the authors focus on different American fears, they both touch on important aspects of the American psyche. This paper additionally finds that while they focus on different fears, both The Culture of Fear and The Stranger Next Door offer complementary insights regarding American society.

             The Culture of Fear.

             Sociologist Barry Glassner gets right to the point from the very beginning, when he asks the reader "Why are so many fears in the air, and many of them unfounded?" (xi).