A shocking exposé of judicial overreach.
In this hard-hitting debut, journalist Potter likens the Justice Department targeting of environmentalists today to McCarthyism in the 1950s.
The author argues that culture war is “at the heart of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, from the Red Scare to the War on Terrorism.” Citing historian Richard Hofstadter, he describes this as “ ‘the paranoid style in American politics’…the eternal fear…that the American way of life is under attack.” Potter’s concern with the targeting of environmental activists began with a personal experience. Although he became a vegan when he was a student at the University of Texas and joined a few activist groups to protest economic sanctions in Iraq, in 2002 he was working as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune. On a whim, he participated in a canvassing campaign organized by a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, whose aim was to close down the laboratory of Huntingdon Life Sciences, guilty of “repeated animal welfare violations.” The organizers were arrested for trespass, and shortly thereafter two FBI agents appeared at Potter’s apartment requesting information about the group. He was told that if he refused to cooperate with them, his name would be included on the domestic terrorist list. The author describes how the experience marked the beginning of a personal and political journey that led him to question why environmentalists were being treated as domestic threats on par with terrorists. Though he does not deny that animal-rights groups have been guilty of crimes such as arson, he charges that different standards are used to judge anti-abortion activists and environmentalists “not because of the nature of the crime but because of the politics of the crime.” Potter left the Tribune and became actively involved in the legal defense of so-called “eco-terrorists.”
A shocking exposé of judicial overreach.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-87286-538-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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