I did something very dumb in my life and I'm writing this book so others will read it-and won't repeat it. Our family enjoyed a happily married life. We shared unconditional love. But to keep earning that love from his son, his father became obsessed and met his every want. He became spoiled, grew greedy, then slipped into dishonesty. Our son spent the rest of his days taking advantage of our kindness, benevolence, and wealth. It destroyed our family and our loving marriage. The result has been (perhaps deservedly) an old age of poverty. Here is my memoir of that life. Mae Cardinal
"I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare...."-- Montaigne "All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.'" -- Tennessee Williams Truth and deception--like good and evil--have long been viewed as diametrically opposed and unreconcilable. Yet, few people can honestly claim they never lie. In fact, deception is practiced habitually in day-to-day life--from the polite compliment that doesn't accurately relay one's true feelings, to self-deception about one's own motivations. What fuels the need for people to intricately construct lies and illusions about their own lives? If deceptions are unconscious, does it mean that we are not responsible for their consequences? Why does self-deception or the need for illusion make us feel uncomfortable? Taking into account the sheer ubiquity and ordinariness of deception, this interdisciplinary work moves away from the cut-and-dried notion of duplicity as evil and illuminates the ways in which deception can also be understood as a adaptive response to the demands of living with others. The book articulates the boundaries between unethical and adaptive deception demonstrating how some lies serve socially approved goals, while others provoke distrust and condemnation. Throughout, the volume focuses on the range of emotions--from feelings of shame, fear, or envy, to those of concern and compassion--that motivate our desire to deceive ourselves and others. Providing an interdisciplinary exploration of the widespread phenomenon of lying and deception, this volume promotes a more fully integrated understanding of how people function in their everyday lives. Case illustrations, humor and wit, concrete examples, and even a mock television sitcom script bring the ideas to life for clinical practitioners, behavioral scientists, and philosophers, and for students in these realms.
Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman -- a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military service, and supported himself with desperately improvised scams, exploiting employers, wives, and, finally, his own son. In The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff unravels the enigma of this Gatsbyesque figure, a bad man who somehow was also a very good father, an inveterate liar who falsified everything but love.
Explores the author's theorized evolutionary basis for self-deception, which he says is tied to group conflict, courtship, neurophysiology, and immunology, but can be negated by awareness of it and its results.
In the fourth novel of Delany's acclaimed series, Jessica and Rusakovas are fighting to overcome one of their biggest challenges yet--the possibility of a cure for lycanthropy.
A year and a half after the horrific Masonville High mass shooting, Owen is determined to uncover why the Creepers have converged on his land and the school--a necessary step toward his ultimate mission to drive evil forces out of Masonville.
In The Liar in Your Life, psychology professor Robert Feldman, one of the world's leading authorities on deception, draws on his immense body of knowledge to give fresh insights into how and why we lie, how our culture has become increasingly tolerant of deception, the cost it exacts on us, and what to do about it. His work is at once surprising and sobering, full of corrections for common myths and explanations of pervasive oversimplifications. Feldman examines marital infidelity, little white lies, career-driven resumé lies, and how we teach children to lie. Along the way, he reveals-despite our beliefs to the contrary- how it is nearly impossible to spot a liar (studies have shown no relationship between nervousness, lack of eye contact, or a trembling voice, and acts of deception). He also provides startling evidence of just how integral lying is to our culture; indeed, his research shows that two people, meeting for the first time, will lie to each other an average of three times in the first ten minutes of a conversation. Feldman uses this discussion of deception to explore ways we can cope with infidelity, betrayal, and mistrust, in our friends and family. He also describes the lies we tell ourselves: Sometimes, the liar in your life is the person you see in the mirror. With incisive clarity and wry wit, Feldman has written a truthful book for anyone who whose life has been touched by deception.
The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility. Praise for This Boy’s Life “Wolff writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, [and] creates suspense around ordinary events, locating the deep mystery within them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[This] extraordinary memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the 50s.” —The Oregonian
This book considers the role of deception during adolescence, and explores the factors which underpin adolescents’ choice to deceive, whether these deceptions will be successful, and the ways in which such lies could be detected. While deception is considered to be antisocial or even pathological in some circumstances, the central argument of this book is that lying can be a skilled behaviour which is necessary to allow adolescents to establish autonomy. Deception builds on the recent influential developmental challenge model (Hendry and Kloep, 2002, 2009), exploring how it can provide a useful explanatory framework for the development of the skill of deception in adolescence. Interpersonal and forensic settings for deceptive behaviour are referred to, and illustrated with reference to both published research and new data obtained from a variety of different interviews and focus groups with young people. It also considers how the choice to communicate truthfully is as important as the choice to communicate deceptively in illuminating the developmental process. It concludes with a discussion of how adolescents’ deceptions could be detected and presents a range of strategies to maximize the effectiveness of interpersonal interactions with suspected deceivers. By considering everyday, forensic and clinical deception situations, this book is ideal for academic researchers, practitioners working with children and young people, as well as parents. The observations, interviews and focus groups provide a unique insight into the factors influencing young people’s communication choices, and integrate research from developmental, social and forensic psychology.
