In 1828 a young man in rags appeared in the German city of Nurnberg, saying that he'd been kept isolated in a dungeon all of his life. Was he the bastard offshoot of some noble or royal family, secreted away to preserve the honor of the house? Within a few months he was dead under mysterious circumstances, his mystery still unsolved. CASPER HAUSER uses the uproar caused by Hauser's emergence to focus the white heat of the authors' indignation on the systematic maltreatment of...