Quaintly detailed, if frustrating, Americana, with glimpses of Big Brother ever lurking in the background.
Genesis and evolution of the polygraph, a spurious device that remains a pillar of US law enforcement and national security even though it doesn’t work—except when it does.
Alder (History/Northwestern Univ.), who received great acclaim for his history of the metric system (The Measure of All Things, 2002), meticulously traces the early fascination surrounding the supposed science—but mostly art—of identifying intentional deception. John Larson, a psychologist patterning his work after William Marston, a Harvard professor who noted blood-pressure changes correlated to intentional lying in research subjects, teamed in the early 1920s with legendary Berkeley police chief August Vollmer to bring polygraphic techniques to law enforcement. Larson’s initial foray, an attempt to solve a series of thefts at a local sorority house, was immediately beset with the ambiguities and shortcomings that have since plagued automated lie detection: “Larson unmasked midnight poker games,” Alder notes, “petty shoplifters, pregnancies, and attempted abortions, often without solving the original crime itself.” What followed as Larson, with his young protégé, tinkerer Leonarde Keeler, and Vollmer gravitated toward larger venues of crime in Los Angeles and Chicago, were decades of abuse of a technology that remains a uniquely American article of faith. One often repeated FBI ploy is calling in a suspect to inform him he failed his polygraph test from the day before—true or not—to elicit a confession. Yet Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling and O.J. Simpson both hired polygraphists to produce a record—Skilling liked his and published it; O.J. was reportedly not thrilled with his. And in today’s heightened atmosphere of terror threats, the CIA teaches the same agents who administer polygraph tests how to beat them. The essential contradiction persists: Most courts don’t accept polygraph test results as formal evidence, yet to refuse one (everybody’s right by law) is inevitably seen as an admission of guilt.
Quaintly detailed, if frustrating, Americana, with glimpses of Big Brother ever lurking in the background.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-5988-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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