But while "The Plot Against America" concedes (after a fashion; the book has a rather gratuitous "secret" revealed at the end) that the rise of a murderously anti-Semitic regime is possible, even in the U.S., it is not his Jewishness that spurs Herman Roth's defiance of that regime, but his Americanness. Roth has not strayed so far from his old ways after all. To be Jews, for Herman and his friends, is "neither a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be 'proud' of." It is rather "in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it." To insist on a place in this country no matter what the "nature of things" might be, this, for Herman Roth, and eventually for his son Philip, is to be American.

Paul, a former senior editor at Psychology Today, tells the colorful and often alarming stories behind the widely used personality tests that date back, in many cases, to the early decades of the 20th century. If you assume these tests were developed under meticulously scientific circumstances, Paul's book is disillusioning: the Rorschach ink-blot test, frequently used in court cases, was inspired by a 19th century parlor game. The Myers-Briggs type indicator, used by most Fortune 100 companies, was devised by a housewife in her living-room chair. The Thematic Apperception Test, used by 60 percent of clinical psychologists, was concocted by a maverick psychologist and his mistress. And for decades, the MMPI's control group -- the "normals" against whom countless people, including me and my eighth-grade classmates, were judged -- was a scavenged hodgepodge of rural white Depression-era Minnesotans.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 1:55 PM  |