SCOURGED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE ... AND ROSE ON THE THIRD DAY. Statements of faith are useful. Their repetition encourages believers to remember what fellow congregants have in common.

Policy analysts of varying stripes also repeat statements of faith. But here, the repetition is less instructive. Criticisms of the politicized university curriculum that recite, yet again, the "water buffalo" story and a few other atrocities of the politically correct from the early 1990s are more effective at shoring up the converted than in persuading the not-yet-converted, let alone aiding the politically correct in seeing the error of their ways.

Something similar pervades The I Hate Corporate America Reader, Book Review No. 34. Editors Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle cull a number of stories from inter alia The Nation, PR Watch, and The Ecologist. The work is a useful reminder that there might be more to the workings of a technologically advanced economy than the corporate cheerleading that sometimes gets into Tech Central Station and the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, yet another recitation of Union Carbide at Bhopal and Exxon Valdez on the rocks suggests to the skeptical reader that contemporary radical politics is as dependent on a few anecdotes as is contemporary criticism of the academy. That the preface and some of the articles have the tone and language of a late-1960s underground newspaper doesn't help. That said, the concluding article on a re-examination of corporate chartering has much to recommend it. If the rules provide for the creation of a limited-liability entity with the purpose of making steel, is a subsequent decision of that entity's management to run hotels instead one that ought be immune from a review of the charter?