Douglas Maynard, Bad news, good news: Conversational
order in everyday talk and clinical settings. University of Chicago
Press. 2003, x + pp. 327. Pb. $25.00.
Maynard's book seeks to make substantive and methodological
contributions: the first to describe the social organization of bad
news/good news pronouncements, and the second to address and bridge
longstanding methodological schisms between ethnography, conversation
analysis (CA), and mainline sociology. Of the eight chapters, three (2, 4,
and 7) were previously published and have been modified for the book.