A leading social scientist blasts the use of social science in the courtroom, in this provocative but cranky collection of lectures delivered at Harvard. Contrary to the implications of the subtitle, Wilson (Management and Public Policy/UCLA; The Moral Sense, 1993, etc.) does not directly take on Alan Dershowitz's The Abuse Excuse (1994), a well-hyped diatribe against state-of-the-art criminal defenses such as drug addiction, black rage, PMS, and Twinkie-binging. Wilson summarily dismisses the notion that an ``avalanche'' of novel pseudo-excuses regularly results in unfair acquittals in homicide trials; the real problem, he counters, is that the job of juries has been compromised by the introduction of needlessly complicated court-made concepts (e.g., ``imperfect self-defense,'' ``premeditation,'' ``diminished capacity,'') and scientifically dubious expert testimony as to such questionable conditions as ``battered women's syndrome.'' According to Wilson, justice would be better served in homicide trials if juries could merely rely on their collective common sense to answer a short list of ``simple'' questions: Did the killing occur in self-defense? If not, was the killer insane? If the killing was intended, was the killer unreasonably provoked? Along with banishing many legal doctrines and most experts, Wilson advocates judge-run voir dires without peremptory challenges by either prosecution or defense, a more active role for judges during trials, and a ``more constrained'' appellate process. In the wake of the Simpson and Menendez trials, many would agree with such reforms, but what makes Wilson seem extremist is his intolerance for the kind of evidence that the defense customarily introduces to excuse or mitigate guilt. Was the defendant intoxicated when he committed the crime? He should've just said no. Was the homicidal wife a battered woman? ``Most of us object'' to the ``stereotype,'' Wilson weirdly declares; even if it's accurate, jurors shouldn't favor such a defendant merely on grounds of ``likability.'' Wilson's sanctimonious calls for ``individual accountability'' and his impatience with human failings fatally detract from some sensible suggestions for legal reform.
Pub Date: May 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-03624-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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