| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. By Ken Alder. (New York: Free Press, 2007. xiv, 334 pp. $27.00, ISBN 978-0-7432-5988-0.)

In Ken Alder's The Lie Detectors, the machine itself is a central character, poisoning the lives of its inventors, mesmerizing a wide public audience, and engendering the deepest form of distrust, that of the self. Yet this absorbing book is not so much an exposé as an attempt to account for the continuing allure of this device in the United States, "despite the avalanche of scientific denunciations" that might have been expected to bury it long ago (p. xiv). Mining an eclectic array of sources, from newspapers and scientific treatises to cartoon strips, Alder finds that the lie detector operated as a "magnifying mirror held up to America's secret fears and desires" (p. 181), reflecting the "techno-scientific" way that this democratic culture has dealt with the problem of deceit, "the original sin of the social contract" (p. 270).

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