Update (I can't resist): 
 Let shame follow this dentist even unto the last drilling and the last filling. & when he crosses the great divide, let all the animals he shot be waiting for him 
 *** 
 THE REVIEW OF THE BOOK 
 Here is a 100% fast fun astonishing intriguing hectic sprint through the strange subject of shame. Our tour guide, Jon Ronson, is an amiable journo who's cherry-picked a few recent spasms of shaming for our delectation and schadenfreude. Like a freak show, we can gawp and shudder in delicious horror. 
 It felt like we were soldiers in a war on other people's flaws 
 The idea is this. In the olden days public shame was part of the judicial process: 
 but that was abolished in 1839. And now... it's BACK. Public shaming has been revived and is in full swing on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. People are making mistakes and they are getting EXTRA-JUDICIAL PUNISHMENT doled out by ourselves, armed with only our keyboards and mices and tablets and iphones. We - us - are now the angry crowd of pitchfork peasants. We shove the miscreants in the stocks and pillories and pelt them with three month old cabbages and decaying turnips. 
 ONE TWEET AND YOUR LIFE ENDS : JUSTINE SACCO 
 Here is the example - the Awful Example - of Justine Sacco. Here is what public shame and utter humiliation does. She was a New York PR employee of some hot shit American conglomerate called IAC which I never heard of. On 20 December 2013 she was off on holiday to South Africa. She used Twitter and had around 30 followers. She was at Heathrow airport waiting for the plane to Cape Town and tweeted 
 Cucumber sandwiches - bad teeth. Back in London! 
 That was the level - unfunny mild insults about British people. Hmph! But then : 
 Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white! 
 Jon Ronson says "she chuckled to herself, pressed SEND and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. 'I got nothing,' she told me. 'No replies.'" 
 Then she went off on her 11 hour flight and couldn't access Twitter. While she was in the plane her tweet exploded. Here's how much it exploded: in October 2013 she was googled 30 times. In November 2013 she was googled 30 times. Between 20 and 31 December 2013 she was googled 1,220,000 times. 
 No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified. 
 Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox news. 
 From IAC, her employers : This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question is currently unreachable. 
 Fascinated by the Justine Sacco train wreck. It's global and apparently she's still on the plane. 
 All I want for Christmas is to see Justine Sacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox 
 In fact her deeply tasteless comment was an attempt to spoof white ignorance. "Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble." 
 The world did not get the joke. ("I can't fully grasp the misconception that's happened round the world".) She had to cut short her holiday. "People were threatening to go on strike at the hotels I was booked into if I showed up". IAC fired her. (In this book people are getting fired for perceived-to-be offensive tweets right and left.) Jon Ronson puts his finger on the reason for the vast avalanche of insult which poured down on Justine Sacco in the last weeks of December 2013: 
 Dragging down Justine Sacco felt like dragging down every rich white person who's ever gotten away with making a racist joke because they could. 
 SILENCE AND RESPECT 
 So JR looks at various horror stories of this type, of lives destroyed by thoughtlessness. Here's another example. Two women were guiding a party of disabled adults around Washington for the charity they worked at. They liked to make spoof photos, like smoking in front of No Smoking signs, juvenile stuff like that. They went to Arlington Cemetery and just took leave of their senses. One posed in front of the sign which says "Silence and Respect" - she pretended she was yelling and was giving the finger as well. What humour - it's the opposite of silence and respect, see? I get it! So did all of Facebook when they insanely put the photo up, and the woman in the photo was fired 
 and spent a year afraid to leave the house. 
 SHAMELESS: THE SICK NAZI ORGY 
 JR examines examples of people who have been horribly shamed but were NOT destroyed. A good example in Britain is Max Mosley. He has had a fair amount of shame to bear in his life - son of Oswald Mosley, who was head of the British Union of Fascists and a supporter of Hitler. Max became head of Formula One racing and he liked to attend S&M parties. One of which was filmed and splattered over a tabloid newspaper here in the UK. There he was whipping girls and being whipped by girls: 
 F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS 
 ... At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old yells "she needs more of ze punishment!" while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette's naked bottom. Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German. 
 Within a year Max had successfully sued the paper for breach of privacy and appeared on a few general political discussion shows in the UK. It turned out that the public couldn't care less about S&M orgies. He was unshamed. 
 This inspires Jon to visit Kink Studios to see if he can answer the question : is the porn industry populated by people immune to shame? Unfortunately he gets frankly rubbishy answers and does not pursue this line. But it does make me wonder - what do the models in even the anodyne disrobings on the most vanilla of porn sites think about their intimate parts captured forever by the internet's powers of recall? Assuming they don't stay in the porn biz for life, does this ever have any repercussions in the private or public sphere? 
 WE ARE THE NEW CROWD OF PEASANTS WITH PITCHFORKS 
 This book is nothing more than lightweight journalism but JR has a knack - just when you wonder what this or that person in the story had to say, what was their angle, what happened to her afterwards - he's anticipated you and he's emailed or skyped or twittered the person and he's got the reply. Jon interviews James Gilligan (author of Violence: A National Epidemic - read and reviewed!) who says that if shaming people worked prison would work and no one would reoffend, but it doesn't work. In the end, says Jon, this has been a book about people who didn't do very much wrong and got vengeance and anger rained down on them. Vengeance and anger and shaming appears to be our default position, here on the internet. I would have liked JR to discuss more why men get shamed in a forensic manner, such as for plagiarism, and women get shamed in a personal manner which very rapidly descends into misogynistic rape & death threats (always the ol' rape 'n' death threats) - he mentions this in a couple of lines then veers off. 
 But that's what this book is - filled with interesting ideas and questions, and leaping from one internet zone to another with the alacrity of an Olympic gold medallist gibbon - from Twitter to 4chan to instagram and back again. He didn't ask us on Goodreads if we had any good stories, though. If he had, we would have collectively put our hands behind our head and gazed at the ceiling and said 
 Well, now, there was once this retired librarian called Ginnie Jones... 
 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...