encouraged people to talk of their own experiences of sexual and physicalabuse and also of verbal insults, teasing and being a source of amusement orridicule to others. The key concepts were clearly put across and were wellreceived. The presentation was concise and methodical starting when a crimeis committed and proceeding through the various legal stages which follow inEngland. Careful attention is paid to describing the inside of a police stationand a court. Court procedure was necessarily simplified and there is no dis-tinction made between a magistrates’ and a Crown court.

We consider ‘Cracking Crime’ to be valuable source material in therapeu-tic and self-advocacy work for people with learning difficulties who have beenboth victims of crime and offenders.

Simon HalsteadConsultant Psychiatrist

Kim HopewellClinical Nurse Specialist

St Andrew’s HospitalNorthampton NN1 5DG

DEATH RITES: LAW AND ETHICS AT THE END OF LIFE

Edited by R. Lee and D. Morgan. Routledge, London EC4. 1994. 328 pp.Hardback , £40.00. ISBN 0-415-06260-8.

If anyone had any doubts that dying and being dead is any less complicated,legally that is, than being born or living, they should read this book. Here acollection of 13 essays covers such wide and interesting areas as what consti-tutes death (is brainstem death, death?) and what is a persistent vegetativestate (and should those in such a state have food and fluids withdrawn?).Should the law seek to limit sexual activity of a person infected with a sexual-ly transmitted disease which may also expose a partner to the risk of death?There are chapters concerned with the rights of animals – justified on theentirely appropriate grounds that any collection of papers on the ethics ofdeath can hardly afford to ignore the death of millions of animals in the nameof medical science as well as commercial interests – and on what is calledSelective Reduction, i.e. the procedures for reducing the number of live foe-tuses carried by a pregnant woman.

The range of topics considered is impressive, but clearly not exhaustive,most drawing attention to the problems created by the increasing capacity ofmedicine to intervene to save lives, or to produce new moral dilemmas by theuse of sophisticated technical devices. Never was there a time when law andmedicine needed each other so much, and never was there a time when thetwo disciplines seem so far apart. But clearly the problems will not be solvedimmediately. In his interesting essay entitled ‘Who wants to live forever?’

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Peter Alldridge shows how the movement in America has been towardsincreasing litigation (‘when in doubt litigate’) but there may be good reasonsin many instances why litigation should not take place to solve disputes: forexample when nutrition and hydration for patients in a vegetative state – orbeing ‘undead’ as it is called – is withdrawn. Moreover, the pressure to pro-mote a right to die will not go away: Jonathan Montgomery asserts thatEnglish law recognises a limited right to die. The conclusions in his chapter‘Power over Death’ would not, I suspect, be accepted generally but he is surelycorrect to say that the idea that patients have rights sits well with the generalshape of English care law and that this will need attention in the near future.What this book shows above all else is the enormous complexity of the sub-ject-matter. This is sometimes too complex, I fear, for those other than legalspecialists to understand, and for those of us who are not such specialists therewill be many legal complexities which are not fully understood.

Inevitably in a book with 13 different contributors there will be somechapters of a higher quality than others. Those that I have singled out for spe-cial recommendation are those which are written in a style that puts the ques-tions into a sociolegal and ethical framework, or rather those which departfrom that endless set of references to higher legal authorities. The chapters byMarie Fox on ‘Animal rights’ or Keith Smith on ‘Risking death by dangeroussexual behaviour’ and Celia Wells on ‘Disasters’ do just that. Others are writ-ten in a less attractive style. They make me ask again the question that con-tinues to puzzle me: what is it about English and Welsh legal education thatstops its students thinking beyond the statutes and the so called legal authori-ties of the judiciary? In a book such as this, with an abundance of ethicalissues surrounding such matters, a little less case law and a little more jurispru-dence would not have come amiss for some of the contributors. Even so thisbook provides an interesting and informative account of an immensely diffi-cult area. It draws attention to matters which will not go away and, if any-thing, will intrude further into our lives.

Philip BeanProfessor of Criminology

Loughborough UniversityLeicestershire LE11 3TU, UK

IMPULSIVITY AND AGGRESSION

Edited by E. Hollander and D. Stein. Wiley, Chichester, West Sussex PO191UD. 1995. 372 pp. Hardback, £50.00. ISBN 0-471-95328-8.

The stated aim of this book is to provide a ‘state of the art summary’ on thephenomenology, neurobiology and treatment of impulsivity and aggressionand specific disorders of impulse control and to inform and orient future

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