The Unjust "Justice"

Name: The Unjust "Justice"
Author: Edward Castle
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6457-1

by Edward Castle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 21, 2011

Despite its literary shortcomings, this volume could add to the ongoing discussion about the treatment of the mentally ill...

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A debut book examines the case of a young man imprisoned for a crime committed while in the grip of mental illness.

Henry Carmel, the son of an Aruban immigrant, is described as a hardworking, “intelligent man with a good heart.” In his late teens, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1996, at the age of 20, Henry was arrested and charged with cruelty to animals after killing with an ax a boarder’s large dog that Henry feared was about to attack him. In a later, separate incident, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after supposedly threatening a former friend with a machete. In 1997, Henry was sentenced to state prison; he “should have been taken to a mental health treatment facility or a state hospital to stay there for the time of the sentence,” the author writes. Castle (a pseudonym) meticulously chronicles Henry’s 14-year legal ordeal solely from the perspective of the Carmel family (also a pseudonym). The author’s disclaimer reports that this book is based on a true story but that “for protection, the names of characters and the time and locale of events have all been changed.” The writer seems to be someone intimately involved in the case (the father, perhaps?). He clearly has a palpable grudge against the deputy district attorney who he claims was hellbent on sending Henry to prison and keeping him there, charging that she behaved despicably. In one re-created telephone conversation she prevails upon a doctor who is to perform an autopsy on the dog to be “as harsh as possible in your report. Have no mercy.” Such stilted scenes ring false, and the author concedes they are fictitious and “intended to strongly convey the message of lack of ethics.” About the “obsessed” members of her office, he writes, “They were ignorant about mental illnesses...and none of them bothered to learn something about the illness so that they could handle relevant legal cases more fairly.” Henry’s legal nightmare is heartbreaking, but he would have been better served by a more objective and skilled author.

Despite its literary shortcomings, this volume could add to the ongoing discussion about the treatment of the mentally ill by the justice system.

Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4620-6457-1

Page Count: 412

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.