NOTE:
Ken Kesey wrote the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and drew on his experiences while working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, California, and set his satirical story at an unnamed state hospital in Oregon, but unlike Kesey’s book, HARD CANDY is absent fiction, is about what happened to my brother and me at the hands of trusted civil servants, and spotlights a hard look into the bleak world of secretive bureaucracies that continue to maintain its operations just short of the Stone Age of insanity; hence, HARD CANDY is A TRUE AMERICAN TRAGEDY, dispels the public myth that it doesn’t happen anymore, and is the book they never wanted written .   

 

 

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION RECOMMENDS THE BOOK AND COLLEGES LISTEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                  

                                                                                                                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Description

In  the late 1940s, Charles Carroll and his brother, Bobby, had the misfortune of being hard-to-place foster children in New Jersey, so the "powers that be" reclassified them from "orphan" to "retarded" and in 1950, exiled them to a state-mental institution where they remained for ten years, deprived of their civil liberties, a right to an education, and denied any semblance of a humane existence.

Beneath the sanitized facade of the institution's administrative offices and visiting rooms, were cramped dormitories and dank basement hellholes. Lazy and inept personnel foisted off supervision of these children to ruthless monitors—older children themselves—who maintained order through methods so sadistic and horrific that "child abuse" seems a chillingly inadequate label. The brothers were victims of an uncaring, ignorant, and underfunded system that was intentionally kept out of the view of polite society. But the differentiating aspect of their imprisonment in that "nuthouse" is the ironic, cosmic hook.  They were not nuts, but in fact, sensitive children with a high IQs, and fully conscious and painfully aware of every moment of not only their abuse, but also the tragic torment of their mentally defective fellow patients. Enduring their collective plight and clinging to their sanity as one would a tiny glimmer of hope, Mr. Carroll vowed to one day write his remarkable story of survival not for himself, but for the benefit of society's outcasts too helpless to help themselves, then and now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GENRE BESTSELLER

On September 18, '2006, HARD CANDY made #1 on the Canadian Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Family/Childhood.  In the U.S. on February 1, 2008, the book took #3 on the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Memoir/Biography. On October 20, 2008, the book made #2 on the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Dysfunctional Relationships, and on October 23, 2009, HARD CANDY made the Amazon bestseller list for the genre, Child Abuse—and continues to land on these bestseller lists. NOTE: These genre bestsellers are the avenues by which some of its "better books" become national bestsellers.

                

 

                                             

 

  

                                                   Mr. Carroll,

                                                   I fully share your view that awareness and education are essential to child abuse  prevention. and I

                                                   do wish you every success with your project.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                  Henry Waxman
                                                                                                                                                            Congress of the United States

 

 

 

      Mr. Carroll,

    It's evident that you are committed to standing up in the face of injustice--may you

    continue with that depth of commitment in your writing and all that you do.

                                                                                                                                           —Elie Wiesel

                                                                                       Recipient of the Congressional Medal of  Honor

                                                                                                                                  Nobel Prize Winner

                                                                                                                Author of More Than 40 books

 

 

                                                 HARD CANDY is important and brave, comprehensive, real, and ever so true. It opens us to the real 

                                                 culprits of sexual abuse—the people, the secular authorities, to whom we've entrusted our children. It 

                                                 talks about who does it, how it happens, why it happens, how to recognize it, and what to do.

                                                 Charles A. Carroll opens the doors on our society's most hidden plague, the sexual abuse of boys.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                —Chuck Rosenthal

                                                                                                                                                   Author of the book: Never Let Me Go:

                                                                                                                                                             A Portrait of Sexual Predation 
                                                                                                                                                     English Professor, Loyola Marymount 

 

      

 There is one thing wrong with this book! If I were the publisher of this book, I would have insisted on

 titling it A Terrible, Terrible Crime or some other terribly dramatic title so that it would better attract  

 the morbid curiosity of the mass reading public, become a bestseller and help end a terrible crime. 

 This book deserves to be a bestseller!

                                                                                                                                            —Art Kunkin

                                                                                                                    Founder, Publisher and Editor

                                                                                                                            Los Angeles Free Press

 

                                                 

                                                  The story Carroll tells will read like wild fiction to some readers. But I  can attest that the Hell he

                                                  describes is no exaggeration. My mother worked at state mental hospitals in Michigan in the 1980s and 

                                                  1990s. I worked in private care, lasting all of three months. As an attorney, I represented several private

                                                  psychiatric hospitals, orphanages, and child care facilities, public and private, in sex abuse and

                                                  wrongful death cases. I learned what "positional asphyxia" can do to the body of a child, and how hard

                                                  it is to find a resident who has wandered away before he freezes. Much of it I'm bound by privilege not 

                                                  to repeat. But I've seen enough to know that Carroll's story is true.

                                                  http://laurajames.typepad.com/clews/2006/11/

                                                                                                                                                                 —Author, Laura James, Esq.

                                                                                                                                                      Crime Historian/Proprietor of Clews

                                                                                                                                                        Writes blog on crime and its history

                                                                                                                           

 

                                                                                         
                                                                              

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

 

 

When I set out to write HARD CANDY I wanted to believe in the system.  I wanted to  believe things had changed, and I wanted to believe the public myth that is doesn’t happen anymore.  Had I learned it was otherwise, I would not have written this book, because with my story alone the reader would have come way concluding, oh, well, that was more than 40  years ago, it doesn’t happen anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is clear.  The atrocities are current, ongoing, and tragically appalling—a sour tasting elixir that injected  iron in my backbone and sulfur into my blood—to be the voice for victims who, today, are still trembling behind closed doors awaiting redemption from their abusive reign of terror at the hands of trusted civil servants. 

HARD CANDY is a human portrayal of an uncommon nature. No one thing contributes more to its value than its authenticity, but be forewarned, you will not find literary frills,  polite language, soft corners of prose, soothing seams of  dialogue, happy jingles or joyful songs, but you will find a thread of love that weaves together the entire story—a story about a special devotion shared between my brother and me; how we cared for each other when no one else would; how we understood each other when no one else did; and how we desperately clung to the needed components of love and friendship to survive together the horrific reality.

 

HARD CANDY will give you a glimpse into the bleak world of institutional “bad   guys”—administrators, trusted civil servants, and resident monitors that stood side by side with idiots and madmen who deliberately committed atrocities against these children, causing many to flee into an unconventional brand of protection, which was a futile attempt to gain some semblance of refuge because there was no legitimate protection for them.  After suffering a decade of abuse, at sixteen, I was released from the mental institution carrying the scars from having been denied my civil liberties, a right to an education, and any semblance of a humane existence—and because there was no habilitation I felt lost and floundered for a number of years within the broad public spectrum of human progress.