What if you wrote to the Baseball Hall of Fame offering to donate a full set of Mickey Mantle's toenail clippings? Why, they'd be glad to have 'em--even if you are "a Level 4 bed-wetter." Cooperstown is only one of many institutions terrorized in Letters from a Nut, a collection of crazed correspondence by Ted L. Nancy. The name is a pseudonym, perhaps for Jerry Seinfeld, who wrote the introduction. Seinfeld never comes clean, but the yocks sure sound like his material. And the letters have his prints all over them--who else would write the L.A. Lakers posing as a rabid fan who wears pants with a see-through back end, "for medical reasons"? Whoever wrote it, the book's a real lark. Where else can you meet "Pip, the Mighty Squeak," a man who gambles in a giant shrimp costume, or a corn that looks like Shelley Fabares? Only inside the fevered brain of Ted L. Nancy--whether he's Jerry Seinfeld or not.
Privacy isn't all it's made out to be, says George Washington University scholar Amitai Etzioni. "Without privacy no society can long remain free," he writes, but our communities also have other goals that sometimes must override the privacy imperative. "Should the FBI be in a position to crack the encrypted messages employed by terrorists before they use them to orchestrate the next Oklahoma City bombing?" he asks. Etzioni's answer is a resounding "yes," and he applies similar logic to a number of areas. He believes, for example, that newborn babies should undergo HIV tests without parental consent because they could benefit from immediate treatment, even though mothers worried about personal revelations might object. He also supports the various sorts of "Megan's laws" that try to protect society against sex offenders.
This is a hands-on career planning manual which was written to educate people with serious mental illness and the employment professionals who work with them. The book encourages people to take charge in choosing a career path, developing job goals and taking responsibility for planning their job-search strategies. I found it is well-written and down-to-earth, offering many worksheets, career planning profiles, tips, and sample letters and resumes to help the job searcher. It is probably for the beginner job applicant more so than for people with less serious mental illnesses. It also includes an entire chapter devoted to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), etc. It is 137 pages long, in a workbook format, and was published in 1995.
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