SOURCE: "I'm O.K., You're Nowhere Near O.K.," in The New York Times, April 4, 1995, p. C18.

[In the review below, Kakutani argues that Wendy Kaminer's It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture reads more like an "impassioned polemic than a reasoned piece of analysis."]

Wendy Kaminer's last book, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, was a terrifically witty, intelligent and cogent assessment of the recovery movement and its implications for American society at large. In that volume, Ms. Kaminer not only sketched the history and sources of the current vogue for self-help and public confession, but also performed a devastating deconstruction of the movement's simplistic (not to mention highly narcissistic) ethos of personal growth. Her latest book, It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture, purports to take up where I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional left off.

As Ms. Kaminer sees it, the recovery movement's emphasis on touchy-feely empathy stands in...