Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test
Having never read anything by Jon Ronson before, it took me about 3 pages to realize that he’s an amazing journalist. Learning more about psychopaths becomes an obsession of sorts for Ronson and on his path towards learning more about them, Ronson finds both likeminded people, as well as some exemplary psychopaths. There are murderers, institutionalized psychopaths, researchers who have spent their entire lives studying psychopaths, scientologists, and more psychologists than could be counted on 2 hands. 
This book is simultaneously fascinating and creepy. Early on in the book, Ronson has a discussion with a psychologist who studies psychopaths and she tells him of an encounter where she was showing one of her study subjects various emotions and asking him to identify them. After seeing “fear”, the subject responded by saying that he couldn’t identify the emotion but it looked similar to the faces people pulled before he murdered them. Ronson learns more and more about the subject in hand and eventually encounters some fo the foremost researchers in the field.
There does come a point where it is clear that Ronson has learned more than he should and has clearly become obsessed with the topic at hand. In one chapter, he is sitting at the bar of a hotel with one of the psychologists he has interviewed for the book and the two of them catch themselves wondering if the concierge of the hotel is a psychopath, soon recognizing just how ridiculous they are being.
Overall, this book is fascinating. It’s a quick and easy read but it might make you subject friends and loved ones to your own psychological evaluations. But don’t worry; it does go away.

Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test

Having never read anything by Jon Ronson before, it took me about 3 pages to realize that he’s an amazing journalist. Learning more about psychopaths becomes an obsession of sorts for Ronson and on his path towards learning more about them, Ronson finds both likeminded people, as well as some exemplary psychopaths. There are murderers, institutionalized psychopaths, researchers who have spent their entire lives studying psychopaths, scientologists, and more psychologists than could be counted on 2 hands. 

This book is simultaneously fascinating and creepy. Early on in the book, Ronson has a discussion with a psychologist who studies psychopaths and she tells him of an encounter where she was showing one of her study subjects various emotions and asking him to identify them. After seeing “fear”, the subject responded by saying that he couldn’t identify the emotion but it looked similar to the faces people pulled before he murdered them. Ronson learns more and more about the subject in hand and eventually encounters some fo the foremost researchers in the field.

There does come a point where it is clear that Ronson has learned more than he should and has clearly become obsessed with the topic at hand. In one chapter, he is sitting at the bar of a hotel with one of the psychologists he has interviewed for the book and the two of them catch themselves wondering if the concierge of the hotel is a psychopath, soon recognizing just how ridiculous they are being.

Overall, this book is fascinating. It’s a quick and easy read but it might make you subject friends and loved ones to your own psychological evaluations. But don’t worry; it does go away.