Stripped Naked

In this third installment of her autobiographical story, Stratford ( I Know You're Hurting ) details her multiple personality disorder and the treatment she continues to undergo. Her disorder, she states, was the result of ritual abuse during her childhood at the hands of Satanists, who actually fostered alter personalities for specific functions. This lengthy volume adds little to existing literature on ritual abuse, including previous books by Stratford herself. Here she tells the digressive and irrelevant stories of many other victims of abuse, such as political prisoners and Lisa Steinberg, but fails in her effort to draw analogies between them and herself. She also spends an entire chapter relating in laborious detail the favorite toys of ``Baby,'' the first of her alter personalities to make itself known. One gets the impression from Stratford that there must be hundreds of thousands of Satan worshipers out there abusing and programming children who then repress these memories. Stratford may feel that she is ``stripped naked'' by telling her story. Her personal suffering aside, readers will be left hoping the striptease has ended and there's nothing more to expose. (Aug.)