Books in Brief
One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel (St. Martin's Press, 320 pp., $23.95)Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, are no strangers to firestorms. Sommers enraged paleofeminists with her books The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism? Psychiatrist Satel is "a conservative ideologue in a doctor's white lab coat," sniffed Salon in a review of her book PC, M.D.
Their new collaboration, One Nation Under Therapy, will add some educators and therapists to the Greek chorus of naysayers. But the rest of us should be grateful that the book challenges such enshrined notions as: unbridled emoting shortens the grieving period; dodgeball, tag, and, indeed, any form of competition threaten children's tender psyches; adversity has no redeeming value; and grief therapists are among the most valuable players at a disaster site.
This last group is singled out for close examination. Believing that the highest need of anyone remotely connected to a tragedy is to relive it, pronto, with a complete stranger, many grief counselors are dangerously close to being a self-parody. In between truly horrific events, they can be found, for example, consoling staff at the Boston Public Library after a flood or holding employees' hands at the news that their 401(k) has just gone south.
But it's not just survivors of catastrophes that are targeted for intervention. Children are seen by some as particularly vulnerable. The chapter on therapistic education, detailing schools' extravagant measures in promoting self-esteem, is an eye-opener, especially when coupled with evidence showing that too high an opinion of oneself has deleterious effects.
Another chapter skewers the buck-passing that criminals employ, coming up with such novel ailments as Super Bowl Sunday syndrome and urban survival syndrome. Would that more psychiatrists took the line of the one quoted who, when a burglar asked him to help discover the motive for his misdeeds, responded, "How about greed, laziness, and a thirst for excitement?"
--Susie Currie
Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America by Mark R. Levin (Regnery, 288 pp., $27.95)As the nation awaits the inevitable battle over President Bush's first appointment to the Supreme Court, legal commentator Mark Levin takes readers on a flabbergasting survey of how activist judges have used the theory of a "living" Constitution to foreclose democratic debate on issues from abortion to affirmative action. In explaining how this theory has so often led to judicial tyranny, Levin shows what will be at stake when the president nominates a judge committed to applying the plain text of the Constitution and the intent of its framers to the High Court, and the left moves to defend its last ideological redoubt.
In refreshing contrast to the mincing qualifications that clutter most legal books, Levin uses plain language to expose how activist judges work. Armed with fuzzy theories that conjure up new and "unenumerated" constitutional rights, they manipulate the law to such an extent that, as Levin writes, "the judiciary, operating outside its scope, is the greatest threat to representative government we face today." A case in point is the Supreme Court's recent decision that executing a Missouri man who, at age 17, kidnapped, bound, and drowned a young mother, would violate a "moral consensus" shared by five out of nine justices (though not by the citizens of Missouri).
For those who imagine the Senate Judiciary Committee to be an impartial panel, Levin provides troves of documents detailing just how ferociously Senate Democrats politicized the hearings on President Bush's first-term judicial nominees. One memo circulated among Democratic senators describes a "meeting focused on identifying the most controversial and/or vulnerable judicial nominees, and a strategy for targeting them." Such documents foreshadow the ideological gauntlet that any originalist nominee to the court will inevitably run. The irony, as Levin points out, is that Bush's nominees may well be blocked for not being activist enough. The battle will be fierce, but Men in Black makes excellent ammunition.
--Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky