Books: Penmanship

THE TREATMENT MAN (325 pp.)—William Wiegand—McGraw-Hill ($4.95).

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) once designed a kind of Orwellian prison called the panopticon, a jail building meant to provide warders with a view into the cells. It was never executed, but audiences have enjoyed panopticonic vision for years. Countless films and TV plays have made the state pen almost as familiar a setting as Tombstone—the hostages with shivs at their throats, the leader in the besieged cell block on the phone to the warden, the Spartacus-in-denims who invariably fails to make it out of stir. Giving the old plot a new twist, Novelist William...