The publisher is trumpeting how Kessler's revelations here of William Sessions's abuses of office led to the former FBI director's dismissal—but those revelations form only one small part of Kessler's comprehensive, largely approving examination of how today's FBI emerged from the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover. Sessions granted former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter Kessler (Escape From the CIA, 1991, etc.) unprecedented access to the agency, which Kessler used to gain more than 300 interviews. In the process, while picturing Sessions as a generally decent man who made a point of hiring women and minority agents, Kessler also found him to be an agency cheerleader who disguised personal travel as business trips and turned a blind eye to similar exploitation of power by his wife and assistant. But despite its chiefs' failings (according to Kessler, all but William Webster took improper advantage of their position), today's FBI, Kessler says, is ``an American success story'' that, unlike the publicity-minded institution of the Hoover era, is willing to zero- in on large targets that may not yield immediate results, such as drugs, white-collar crime, the Mafia, and political corruption. Though occasionally embarrassed—recent years have seen racial- discrimination suits; requests that librarians identify users of scientific and technical information; the first agents caught trading secrets to the Soviets, dealing drugs, and attending a sex club—the FBI retains its cadre of dedicated, well-trained agents. Elegant prose isn't Kessler's strongest suit (he repeatedly describes women as ``attractive'' or some variation thereof), but he's gotten agents to open up about the organization's inner workings. Field offices such as L.A. (which combats auto theft, drug-dealing, and celebrity-stalking) and N.Y.C. (which cracked the World Trade Center bombing) are described, as are the famed training and serial-killer ``profiling'' divisions, featured in The Silence of the Lambs. A revealing glimpse of an American institution in transition. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-78657-1
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
A mostly unsuccessful attempt to fathom the psyche of a doctor who claimed that voices often directed his bizarre behavior. Ablow, a columnist for the Washington Post and a practicing psychiatrist in Lynn, Mass., examines John Kappler's troubled life and tries to peer into his tortured mind. He opens this account with the day that Kappler, a truly unsympathetic character and a terribly dangerous man, drove his car off a parkway in Boston and aimed it carefully at two people on a pedestrian path. One of them, a psychiatrist friend of the author's, was killed. Ablow then turns to Kappler's childhood, looking for clues and speculating about the causes of his instability, anger, and destructiveness. He traces Kappler's spotty medical career (he was a freelance anesthesiologist, working out of some 50 hospitals in the Los Angeles area) and his frequent nervous breakdowns. Over the years Kappler received more than a dozen different diagnoses from psychiatrists and sporadically took numerous medications, including antipsychotics. Though he seems to have received little real help, it is not clear that he would accept any. Despite his problems and the threat his erratic behavior posed to patients, he continued practicing medicine until 1985, when he was accused of turning off a patient's life support system. Although the charges were later dismissed, Kappler, thoroughly disgraced, finally retired. The last portion of the book focuses on the murder trial in Boston, at which the central issue was whether Kappler was accountable for his actions or not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury found him guilty, but Ablow argues that he should more properly be seen as a victim—both of mental illness and of psychiatry's failure to help him. Ablow speculates and opines freely, but Kappler, who refused to be interviewed, remains a dark mystery.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-900161-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Armstrong issues a sobering call to repoliticize the issue of incest, which has fallen prey to the mental health field, its cadre of ``experts,'' and an antifeminist backlash. In 1978 Armstrong published Kiss Daddy Goodnight, which presented incest as ``the cradle of sexual politics'' where the rights of women and children collide with male entitlement and abuse of power. The attendant media hype turned Armstrong into ``the World's First Walking, Talking Incest Victim''; and since then she has witnessed the telling of incest stories become an end in itself. The personal is no longer political, she says, just public, as people accept fees to tell of their abuse on TV talk shows. She identifies a trajectory in public attitudes toward incest: first, it was ignored; in the mid-1980s the publication of The Courage to Heal (the incest ``Bible'') encouraged a therapeutic, personal approach to ``recovery'' devoid of any social significance; now, Armstrong argues, the issue is dominated by antifeminist backlash and sensational tales of satanic ritual abuse and of men and their families wrongly accused as a result of false- memory syndrome. Virtually ``every aspect of the social response to the issue of incest,'' she writes, ``has implied a policy of appeasement toward men.'' Armstrong documents a decade and a half of evasive responses to the problem of incest during which the number of children being sexually abused continued apace. These responses ranged from viewing incest as a mental illness rather than an abuse of power to abuse prevention ``games'' for children that overlook the fact that the offender is often a parent or trusted adult. An important, incendiary, unapologetic history written in hopes of rekindling the possibility of radical change—nothing less than a redistribution of gender power.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62471-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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