It's All The Rage: Crime And Culture [Paperback]

Wendy Kaminer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 1996

From our decrying of ”the abuse excuse” to our cheers of Free the Juice,” our reactions to violent crime fluctuate wildly. Expanding on her well-known ideas about self-help and the American psyche, Wendy Kaminer shows us how pop-psychology and religious fervor vie with law and rationality in our courtrooms and in our minds. She doesn’t offer up any easy solutions; rather, with her trademark epigrammatic brilliance, she gives us an alarming picture of the emotional needs and cultural forces behind our righteous proclamations about crime and punishment.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The core question asked in It's All the Rage casts a long shadow: "Who deserves to die?" This is a book about the death penalty. "Knowledge about it," writes Wendy Kaminer, "is not widely shared--how it is applied and to whom, what it costs and accomplishes. Public perceptions about the death penalty--that it is cheaper to execute people than imprison them for life, that appeals in a capital cases are a great burden to the courts--are almost invariably wrong." Fear, rage, and desire for a simple solution fuel the debate.

Kaminer presents the heated debates on capital punishment, as well as an examination--historically, judicially, ethically--of the phenomenon. Offering a unique viewpoint, she points out the gap between the recovery movement and its soft ethics ("we're all victims of dysfunctional families; feel my pain") and the hard standards applied, for example, to those on death row. How can we sanction whining and irresponsibility in the noncriminal segment of society and cruel and unusual punishment in the other?

Hers is a humor riddled with impatience, straining to hold onto ethics in an ethically slippery time. On the nature of public support for the death penalty: "People don't trust the Postal Service to deliver the mail, or the IRS to enforce the tax code with fairness and good sense; they don't trust the Parking Violations Bureau to process traffic tickets or refrain from towing cars for no good reason. Yet, out of fear or fury or wishful thinking about deterrence, they trust the criminal justice system with the power to put people to death. What is perhaps most notable about the death penalty is its irrationality." This is a strong example of Kaminer's "cutting through the B.S." style. The subject is grim; one hesitates to use the word "entertaining." But It's All the Rage is. Indeed, Kaminer's voice pulls the reader through contradictory points of view; commentaries on some of the decade's more sensational court cases, studies, polls and the inimitable Kaminer extrapolations. This can sometimes feel like a wild ride, but it's well worth the motion discomfort. --Hollis Giammatteo

From Publishers Weekly

Kaminer segues from I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional to assess with insight and irony contradictions in our criminal justice system. "[W]e tend to alternate between judging too harshly... and not judging at all," she concludes, finding that "virtue talk" on character reform is applied mainly to issues like crime and welfare but not to other policy areas. We have trouble punishing "guilty victims" like Lorena Bobbitt, who in 1994 was exonerated for mutilating her abusive husband, and Kaminer wisely suggests that sympathy be left for sentencing. She finds a telling contradiction in our "popular obsession with child abuse" and our endorsement of the caning administered by Singapore in 1994 to an American teenager convicted of vandalism. She argues that "victims' rights" can overwhelm public justice. A large chunk of the book concerns the death penalty; Kaminer traces the evolution of the reasons people support the death penalty from deterrence to retribution; she scores the judicial system's acceptance of unfair prosecutions; and she suggests that, until more people have direct experience with capital trials, the system will stand. This book, however, is hardly comprehensive: Kaminer could have better explored such issues as the battered-wife defense, as well as international arguments about crime and culture.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 21 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 23, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201488337
• ISBN-13: 978-0201488333
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,397,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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