Product Description: Life is hard in the Beardsley Terrace housing projects of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and seventeen-year-old Jesse Westbrook has built a dangerous reputation for himself by necessity. His family offers a calming, supportive environment, even if his stepfather has questionable mob connections...read more

An examination of 'enhancement technologies' in America considers the pervasiveness of self-improvement drugs and procedures in spite of society's general unease about their use, considering the reasons why people obsessively pursue self-happiness through conformist methods. Reprint. 13,000 first printing.

Product Description: This deeply moving story chronicles the tenacity and vision that carried Carl Elliott from the hills of northwest Alabama to eight distinguished terms in the United States House of Representatives.Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Carl Elliott worked his way through The University of Alabama during the Great Depression and was elected to Congress in 1948...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Walker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. Trained as a doctor at Columbia University, he contracted tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital and spent the next three years recovering, primarily in TB sanitoriums...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Addresses the question: Can we apply ordinary standards of responsibility to the mentally disordered offender?In The Rules of Insanity, Carl Elliott draws on philosophy and psychiatry to develop a conceptual framework for judging the moral responsibility of mentally ill offenders. Arguing that there is little useful that can be said about the responsibility of mentally ill offenders in general, Elliott looks at specific mental illnesses in detail; among them schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorders, psychosexual disorders such as exhibitionism and voyeurism, personality disorders, and impulse control disorders such as kleptomania and pyromania. He takes a particularly hard look at the psychopath or sociopath, who many have argued is incapable of understanding morality. Making extensive use of psychiatric case histories, Elliott explores the various ways in which mental illness can affect a person’s intentions and thus excuse him or her from moral responsibility."This is the best discussion of the insanity defense and diminished capacity that I have seen from an ethics point of view. Other treatments tend to be more legally oriented and to make light of the more fundamental philosophical and ethical issues. What is special is the author's easy familiarity with the clinical problems (he is a physician), his well reasoned, well written, jargon free argument, and his capacity to go back and forth from general principles to particular cases and disorders. This book has a unique niche--its conclusions are responsible--it teaches a lot." -- Michael Schwartz, M.D., Case Western Reserve University

Product Description: This deeply moving story chronicles the tenacity and vision that carried Carl Elliott from the hills of northwest Alabama to eight distinguished terms in the United States House of Representatives.Born in a log cabin on a tenant farm in 1913, Carl Elliott worked his way through The University of Alabama during the Great Depression and was elected to Congress in 1948...read more