Review, Windows into the Soul: Surveillance in an Age of High Technology

No review can begin to do justice to this grand synthesis of a lifetime of critical social science research on surveillance. Windows into the Soul is not a compilation of past publications, but rather a fresh reappraisal of surveillance studies. 1 Reportedly twenty-five years in the making, the original manuscript was twice as long. Even though the book is tightly organized and readily accessible to non-specialists, its bounty could not be contained within its ample covers. So the interested reader is periodically referred to the publisher's website for relevant selections deleted from the manuscript. There she not only discovers further textual enlightenment, but also a virtual museum of fascinating artifacts collected during Marx's long engagement with the topic, including a display of visual representations of surveillance, an archive of song lyrics evoking surveillance, and much more. Marx's substantive footnotes similarly engage and reward.