Charles Sykes's ProfScam sparked a furious debate over the mission and the failure of our universities. Now he turns his attention to an even more controversial subject. A Nation of Victims is the first book on the startling decay of the American backbone and the disease that is causing it. The spread of victimism has been widely noted in the media; indeed, its symptoms have produced best-selling books, fueled television ratings, spawned hundreds of support groups, and enriched tens of thousands of lawyers across the country. The plaint of the victim - Its not my fault - has become the loudest and most influential voice in America, an instrument of personal and lasting political change. In this incisive, pugnacious, frequently hilarious book, Charles Sykes reveals a society that is tribalizing, where individuals and groups define themselves not by shared culture, but by their status as victims. Victims of parents, of families, of men, of women, of the workplace, of sex, of stress, of drugs, of food, of college reading lists, of personal physical characteristics - these and a host of other groups are engaged in an ever-escalating fight for attention, sympathy, money, and legal or governmental protection. What's going on and how did we get to this point? Sykes traces the inexorable rise of the therapeutic culture and the decline of American self-reliance. With example after example, he shows how victimism has co-opted the genuine victories of the civil-rights movement for less worthy goals. And he offers hope: the prospect of a culture of renewed character, where society lends compassion to those who truly need it. Like Shelby Steele, Charles Murray, and Dinesh D'Souza, Charles Sykes defines the ground of what will be a significant national debate. Here is yet another manifestation of the intellectual backlash against the diagnosing of every bad personal habit as an illness and the myriad self-help groups modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) that have arisen from this phenomenon. (See Wendy Kaminer's I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional , LJ 6/1/92.) Sykes ( ProfScam , Regnery Gateway, 1988) argues, in a journalistic, rambling, and superficial style, that we have allowed psychotherapy to run amok and now routinely accept the illness excuse in cases of public misconduct or personal sloth. Murder, for example, is variously attributed to fetal alcohol syndrome or junk food diets. This perception of ourselves as a nation of victims represents nothing less than the decay of the American character. Sykes calls for a "moratorium on blame" and a return to the acceptance of personal responsibility for one's actions along with stiff penalties for criminal behavior. An optional purchase for academic and public libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/92. - Jeffrey R. Herold, Bucyrus P.L., Ohio Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. In an alternately provocative and cranky jeremiad on the decline of individual responsibility, Sykes (The Hollow Men, 1990) sounds like a latter-day Walt Whitman--except that he hears America whining, not singing. Much of this vitriolic indictment rehashes the ``political correctness'' battles in academe over the last few years--a topic covered with more originality and dexterity by Sykes's fellow conservative Dinesh D'Souza in Illiberal Education (1991). Sykes is after bigger game, though, discussing how the ``squalling howl of grievance'' now also resounds in the courtroom, on the psychiatrist's couch, and on TV panels. He traces the rise of ``victimism'' to several sources, including psychiatry, whose ``therapeutic culture,'' he says, has stigmatized bourgeois family values and encouraged fruitless searches for personal happiness, and the civil-rights movement, which, he contends, switched its agenda from equal opportunity to equal results and spawned a host of other aggrieved interest groups that did the same. Sykes particularly scores in criticizing Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality for labelling traditional conservative beliefs as psychologically diseased, and he discovers hilarious lawsuits that reveal claimants' astonishing chutzpah (e.g., a worker fired for sexual harassment sued his former employer on the ground that his aberrational conduct qualified him as a handicapped person). But Sykes caricatures the 1960's by making its lunatic fringe representative of the entire culture. Moreover, the vast majority in his crowd of crybabies are liberals: What about Richard Nixon, who blames his troubles on Democrats and the media? Or auto company execs who blame the Japanese for ending their love affair with the American consumer? A lively, if not always balanced, contribution to the unexpected Presidential campaign debate on character and ``family values.'' -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.