"A young man of doubtful parentage struggles to become a physician but is railroaded to prison for a murder he did not commit. When he is released in 1941, he has become a cynic, and founds in Los Angeles the popular 'Healthopathy Clinic, ' where a gathering of medical quacks and cultists minister to a host of neurotic patients, many from the Hollywood colony."--Baird & Greenwood.

When Peter Alagagian had to face his persecutors because he loved God and served Him as a priest, even where godless atheism held sway, he became a martyr for a faith. In this way he has a special message for the world today. But when, after 23 years of Soviet tyranny and prisons, he lived to devote himself as a witness to the Church of Silence, and a witness for us of the love of God, we can well speak of an event of extraordinary importance in our time of compromise.

Shifting perspective from the thematic approach of intellectual history to a more eclectic cultural criticism, Nash introduces a refreshing means to understanding both the figures of the wild man and the citizen of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

Ranging from ancient times to the present, a survey of the evolution of the prison explores its relationship to the history of Western criminal law and offers a look at the social world of prisoners over the centuries.