If you're a bad psychiatrist, think of this as a tale of the Good Old Days.

In 1881, Charles Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield, believing that he had much to do for the administration and that he wasn't getting the chance to do it. Garfield died later that year -- killed not by Garfield's bullets but by the manifest incompetence of his doctors who refused to clean their hands -- and Guiteau was put on trial.

Guiteau's lawyers offered various arguments for why he should not be executed, but basically it all boiled down to insanity. The jury rejected the defense, and Guiteau hanged. But most people think that Guiteau was genuinely nuts.

The real questions were not those asked at the trial: Just what was wrong with Guiteau, and was it enough for him to earn an insanity reprieve? Rosenberg's book tries to give a 1960s answer: Guiteau was a paranoid schizophrenic and, yes, insane. It gives a detailed account of the trial, and a brief history of Guiteau's life, to demonstrate the point. It also looks at mental illness as it was understood in the 1880s.

The latter is useful. So is the discussion of the trial. The material on mental illnesses is not so good. Quite frankly, we've learned a lot since then, and schizophrenia has been largely redefined -- and I'm not convinced Guiteau fits the criteria. Delusional disorder, yes; schizophrenia... hard to say based on what we know now. In any case, the rest of the discussion of mental illness is, shall we say, crazy.

As history, this is a useful book, and a good way to try to get into Guiteau's head. But it won't teach you much about psychiatry, except that it had a long way to go in the 1880s, and that (due in no small part to the errors of Sigmund Freud) it still had a long way to go in the 1960s. I felt the book much too willing to let Guiteau off the hook -- he was loony, but he knew what he was doing; he should have tried to get help, and he didn't. That's crime enough for me. ( )