THE CUSTODY TRAP

A bleak parade of case histories: fathers who can meet their children for only an hour a week in the nurseries of family courts under the supervision of guards;mothers who summon the courage to leave intolerable home situations only to find themselves presumed unfit to raise the children they have ""abandoned""; children who must learn to manipulate judges. The Nobles' survey of legal issues is cursory but not inaccurate. Again and again they show how the current state of the law favors the mother (most of their horror stories present wronged fathers), how the presumptions of adversary justice distort custody cases into unrecognizable sets of legal fictions, how cynically the legal profession looks on this rich vein of human misery. There's a good deal of repetition without profound insight--but the authors make no pretense of heavyweight analysis. A middling-useful, journalistically oriented introduction to a painful subject.