Steven F. Messner is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has taught at Columbia University and Nankai University in the People's Republic of China. His research has focused primarily on the relationship between features of social organization and violent crime rates. His other books include PERSPECTIVES ON CRIME AND DEVIANCE, (with Allen E. Liska), THEORETICAL INTEGRATION IN THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE AND CRIME, (with Marvin D. Krohn and Allen E. Liska), and CRIME AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN A CHANGING CHINA (with Jianhong Liu and Lening Zhang). Dr. Messner has also authored numerous articles and book chapters on the topic of criminal violence and is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.

Richard Rosenfeld is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. His research interests include the social sources of criminal violence, crime statistics, and crime control policy. In addition to this text, Dr. Rosenfeld has recently published articles on the social determinants of support for the death penalty, the measurement of racial profiling in police-citizen encounters, and crime trends in the U.S. Dr. Rosenfeld is a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Law and Justice and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

How has America's over-emphasis on the pursuit of materialistic gain contributed to the it's high rate of violent crime? CRIME AND THE AMERICAN DREAM is an easy-to-understand book that offers clear coveral of criminological theory, using institutional anomie theory as a foundation.