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Rabinowitz,
Dorothy No
Crueler Tyrannies
Rabinowitz, Dorothy
No Crueler Tyrannies
reviews from
www.amazon.com:
From
Wall Street
From
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street
Book Description
In 1742, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, wrote,
"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the
shield of law and in the name of justice." Two hundred forty-three years
later, in 1985, Dorothy Rabinowitz, a syndicated columnist and television
commentator, encountered the case of a New Jersey day care worker named Kelly
Michaels, accused of 280 counts of sexually abusing nursery school children --
and exposed the first of the prosecutorial abuses described in No Crueler
Tyrannies.
No Crueler Tyrannies recalls the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse
witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s: how a single anonymous phone call could
bring to bear an army of recovered-memory therapists, venal and ambitious
prosecutors, and hypocritical judges -- an army that jailed hundreds of
innocent Americans. The overarching story of No Crueler Tyrannies is that of
the Amirault family, who ran the Fells Acres day care center in
No Crueler Tyrannies is at once a truly frightening and at the same time
inspiring book, documenting how these citizens, who became targets of the
justice system in which they had so much faith, came to comprehend that their
lives could be destroyed, that they could be sent to prison for years -- even
decades. No Crueler Tyrannies shows the complicity of the courts, their
hypocrisy and indifference to the claims of justice, but also the courage of
those willing to challenge the runaway prosecutors and the strength of those
who have endured their depredations.
Reviewer: Jean Edouard Pouliot,Newburyport,
MA United States
A good start at a serious work..., August 7, 2003
"No Crueler Tyrannies" retells the frightening prosecutions of
supposed child sexual predators in the 1990s, focusing on the Fells Acre Day
School case in Malden, Massachusetts. The book also skims over several other
less notorious cases of horrifying child abuse. All of these cases show the
alarming propensity among some prosecutors in the 1980s and 1990s to throw
otherwise law-abiding citizens into prison, using the coached testimony of
young children. Not to mention the Catch-22 judgements of so-called child
experts who convinced juries that a child's denial of abuse was proof that it
had taken place.
The book is a quick read, and very sketchy on details. Rabinowitz is satisfied
to tell us about testimony rather than laying it out for us to judge on our
own. This left me with a certain discomfort: it's easy for ideologues to get
their points across when they shout their conclusions without disclosing their
premises or evidence. This weakness aside, it's hard not to be angry and
frightened that prosecutors can so skew the facts (in one case, holding back tape
of an alleged perpetrator's anxious denial of the charges) and that the rest of
us can so blithely go along with them.
The 1980s-an era when it was more and more common for working parents to
entrust their children to day care centers-were ripe for bizarre child
molestation cases. The guilt and anxiety over leaving their children with
"strangers" made it easy for parents to believe that their worst
nightmares were coming true. The post-9/11 environment is ripe for similar
cases - this time targeting those who are perceived to be soft on homeland
security. Books like Rabinowitz's however imperfect, serve as cautionary tales
of our paranoid propensity to believe the worst about each other.
Rogers, Richard (Editor)
Clinical Assessment of Malingering and Deception, 1997
Reviews
Bill Reid, M.D., M.P.H., Clinical and
Forensic Psychiatrist; Past President, American Academy of Psychiatry and the
Law; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Texas, Health Sciences
Center; Former Medical Director, Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental
Retardation
This long-awaited update and complete revision of Dr. Rogers' 1988
Guttmacher-award-winning classic provides clinical and forensic professionals
with the latest knowledge and research findings on malingering and deception.
It brings the reader up to date on the burgeoning literature of dissimulation,
testing, experimental methodology, and contemporary topics such as false
memories, polygraphy, and hypnosis. Dr. Rogers and his very impressive list of
contributors--from psychology, neuropsychology, psychiatry, and law--do not
stray from their goal of practical integration of clinical practice and applied
research in the field. They have given us a worthy successor to his earlier
work
Thomas Grisso, Ph.D., Professor of
Psychiatry (Clinical Psychology)
Much has happened in this field in the past ten years, and every chapter of
Richard Rogers' second edition reflects those advances. This review of research
on malingering and deception, and on methods for their assessment, retains all
of the qualities that made the first edition an indispensable resource for
every mental health professional who performs clinical evaluations. Like the
first edition, this book will be the authoritative benchmark on this topic for
another decade.
Clinical Gerontologist
Exceedingly well done, and a lot of book for the price....