White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism. By Hewitt Roger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 172p. $75.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West. By Quintan Wiktorowicz. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 248p. $75.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.

A book on the white backlash to multicultural politics and another on recruitment to a radical Islamist group seem odd choices to examine together, but the resulting dialogue emphasizes the extraordinary value of comparative methods in general and ethnographic research in particular. In Radical Islam Rising, Quintan Wiktorowicz asks why rational individuals would join a high-risk organization such as al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamist movement based in the UK. Joining entails high risk because members are “targets of stigma, harassment, retaliation, and even more extreme sanctions such as loss of a job, injury, or death” (p. 206; also pp. 45–77). Rational-actor models, he argues, cannot explain why thousands of individuals were attracted to the movement. (The group was formally disbanded in late 2004 but likely continues underground.) Wiktorowicz offers a five-stage model, and the chapters are organized accordingly.