Lullaby For Morons

the long version

"In 1914, many people in America were being wrongly diagnosed as "morons." Most were committed to asylums. Some committed suicide. Two were childhood friends who became involved in the tragedy of America's first school teacher murder--in Poland, New York. The ensuing trial was held in the same Herkimer courthouse as the Gillette-Brown murder case. The trial, which focused on the violent nature of the crime and the "degenerate" behavior of the defendant, quickly eclipsed the Adirondack murder as upstate New York's "Trial of the Century." In this novel, the narrator's character has been reconstructed from historical archives including journals, letters, newspaper articles, trial transcripts, school records, and interviews with surviving witnesses. Fast-paced and suspenseful, anchored in historical fact, Lullaby for Morons takes us into a dark age of medical and legal thinking and the even darker paranoid world of misdiagnosed victims struggling to survive."--Back cover.