Wilce's book is fascinating for the range of cultures it considers--from ancient Greece and pharaonic Egypt to rural Bangladesh and Finland. Especially appealing are Wilce's dazzling and creative conjunctions (such as Phil Spector's American pop-cultural "wall of sound" as a way of appreciating polyphonic funerary laments of the Amazonian rain forest). Wilce's personal and scholarly engagement with the material successfully conveys the nostalgia for emotional authenticity and the longing for fully-lived life that haunt present-day globalized societies.
–David Pinault, author of Notes from the Fortune-Telling Parrot: Islam and the Struggle for Religious Pluralism in Pakistan

Crying Shame brings a broad range of scholarship to bear on the subject of lament. Wilce not only offers a brilliant synthesis of past and present scholarship, but argues persuasively for the continuity of lament in new and surprising forms.
–Gail Holst-Warhaft, Cornell University

In this beautifully written work, alternately rueful and ironically twinkling, Jim Wilce trains a laser-beam of attention on a specific topic—the loss of lament—that turns out to contain worlds. I can think of no recent book that offers so insightful an overview of both traditional and postmodern aspects of culture in the modern, globalized context. It is also an exciting introduction to key theories and controversies in current anthropology and cultural studies.
–Louis Sass, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University

In Crying Shame James Wilce writes eloquently of lament practices as cultural performances that embody some of the deepest cross-currents of modernity and postmodernity. ...a unique combination of subtle analysis and global vision.
–Geoffrey White, University of Hawai'i, Manoa