SO QUESTIONABLE A SHAPE

What is a memory worth when it was manufactured by the room you sat in?

In 1783, an English court rejected a confession because it came in "so questionable a shape" that no credit ought to be given to it. The judges recognized a profound truth: the worth of evidence depends entirely on how it was produced-a fact that becomes entirely invisible once the final product is sitting in a legal record.
So Questionable a Shape collects four complete and unabridged books by Cornelis van Houte into a single authoritative volume:

• Memory in 100 Facts: Explores the organ itself-revealing how memory is not a recording, but a reconstruction assembled at retrieval, susceptible to the misinformation effect and false implantation.
• The Witness in 150 Facts: Argues why "unreliable" is the wrong word for eyewitness evidence, detailing how certainty is manufactured and why safeguards fail.
• The Confession in 150 Facts: Traces the history of testimony against oneself, from trial by ordeal and judicial torture to modern interrogation rooms where false confessions corrupt everything downstream.
• The Lie Detector in 100 Facts: Examines the polygraph-the only device built to determine truth-and demonstrates how it measures arousal rather than deception, acting as a mechanism to manufacture false statements.