Brown maintained that "Violence and the Sacred" formed part of a body of work in which Girard provided valuable readings of literary texts and interpretations of myths. He compared it to the work of the critic Edward Said and the classicist Norman O. Brown. However, he believed it also had features that detracted from its virtues and would cause controversy. He argued that Girard's explanation of sacrifice must in turn depend on an explanation of ritual, and that Girard's thesis that collective murder produced human culture suffers from unresolved theoretical problems. He concluded that the work's importance derived not from its "claims to science" but from its "compelling vision of the plight of modern man". He suggested that, if exposing the nature of the "sacrificial crisis" undermines it and "destroys its authority and power to protect us from our own violent impulses" then "Violence and the Sacred" would be "the ultimate recognition leading to total planetary reciprocal violence that would destroy mankind." He found the book "distractingly shrill".