Review: Raine, The Anatomy of Violence

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime by Adrian Raine

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Raine is a neurocriminologist, someone who looks for the causes of crime in the structures and functions of the brain. I learned a great deal about what various bits of the brain do and about what happens when they don't do their jobs properly. Raine dabbles his toes in evolutionary biology, about which I am sometimes a little dubious, and he leans toward determinism, which--I don't care if it's an illusion, I still prefer to believe I have free will. He at least suggests that there's a spectrum from free will to determinism, that people whose brains function properly have more choice about their actions than people whose brains don't. But I still don't know.

What irritated me most was Raine's attitude toward his readers. He assumes that his readers assume they are "normal" and that they've never thought particularly about the functioning of their own brains. Which, hello, WRONG. He discusses social science as if it is made of failure and doubly so for interpretive lenses like Marxism and feminism, which I think is an overly simplistic dismissal. Ditto for his attitude toward people who work for human rights and civil liberties. He sees them only as people who wrongheadedly prevent criminals from getting the treatment they need. And he's very naive about politics (for which he is to be forgiven, because this book was written before 2016).

So basically his material was fascinating, but his interpretations were sometimes sketchy.



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Review: Lansing, Endurance

Endurance And Shackleton's Way by Alfred Lansing

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[audiobook]
[library]

On the one hand, this was disappointing because it was abridged. (WHY?) On the other hand, I disliked the reader, so perhaps it was just as well I only had to spend 6 hours with him.

This book is an account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed attempt to traverse Antarctica. (Their ship got trapped in the ice, then crushed, and they sledged their three boats across the pack ice, then sailed them to Elephant Island; then, leaving 22 of the men behind on what was basically an uninhabitable island, Shackleton took the most sea-worthy boat and sailed to South Georgia--which, by all rights, they should have died, Google Elephant Island and zoom out until you can see South Georgia, you'll see what I mean--and then, because they were on the wrong side of the island, he and two of his men walked across what was supposed to be the island's impassable interior. So I guess he got some traversing in after all.

(Not a single member of his crew died.)

Almost everyone seems to have kept a detailed diary, so if you want to write a more realistic version of Robinson Crusoe, even the abridged version of this book is full of verisimilitude and details.

It was disappointing, though, compared with In the Heart of the Sea, because--at least in the abridged version--it's nothing but a straightforward account of Shackleton's expedition, ending abruptly as soon as the last man has boarded the rescue ship. Nothing comparable to Philbrick's disquisitions on Nantucket and whaling and other relevant topics. There was no apparatus. (I am the person who listened to Philbrick's reader reading all of his endnotes, so keep that in mind.) It was gripping listening, but ultimately not very satisfying.

Three stars.



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Review: Stone, The Anatomy of Evil

The Anatomy of Evil by Michael H. Stone

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So Stone strikes me as oddly old-fashioned. I've been trying to put my finger on why--he talks about neuroscience and there's nothing noticeably outdated in his understanding of psychopathy and personality disorders. Maybe it's the nature of his project: a twenty-two tiered gradation of evil. Maybe it's that he quotes Dante in his chapter headings. I don't know, but the book does feel old-fashioned.

I appreciate that Stone is willing to take on the big philosophical questions, even if I don't always think he's done the best job of answering them. And his twenty-two gradations do make sense, going from murders of impulse to the likes of David Parker Ray and Leonard Lake. He talks about the reasons people end up on the scale, the neuroscience behind narcissism and antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy. He is less deterministic than Raine, which means I like him better, although still a little too fond of evolutionary biology theory and the idea that our speculations about how primitive human beings lived on the savannas of Africa explain why (mostly) men behave the way they do.

He does get things wrong--for instance somehow forgetting that Richard Speck raped his eight victims before he butchered them (when that fact is actually germane to his argument)--so I'm a little leery of how much weight to give him, but it is an interesting book.



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Review: Peters, The Infamous Harry Hayward

The Infamous Harry Hayward: A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis by Shawn Francis Peters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I find myself profoundly meh about this book, so much so that I'm having a hard time thinking of anything to say about it. It wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't terribly interesting. (Also, the subtitle, "A True Account of Murder and Mesmerism in Gilded Age Minneapolis," is take a few liberties with the truth. Hayward was BELIEVED to mesmerize people, but there's not a lick of evidence to say he actually DID, and he was not a professional, or even amateur, mesmerist.) Hayward was, as Peters says, a textbook psychopath, charismatic, amoral, reckless, homicidal when bored. He devised an elaborate plot to cheat a young woman named Catherine Ging out of all her money and then kill her and collect on her life-insurance policies. The only really remarkable thing here is that he actually found a catspaw to commit the murder for him--on the mistaken theory that if he didn't pull the trigger himself, he couldn't be convicted of her murder. His second line of defense was to throw all the blame on his brother, and I suppose the other remarkable thing here is the Hawyard family dynamics, where in their parents' eyes the bad brother (and Harry Hayward was clearly a bad man long before he met Kittie Ging) could do no wrong and the good brother could do no right (and a third brother apparently stayed the hell out of it).

Competently written (although badly copy-edited) but without the particular gift for exposition that could make me fascinated by this case.



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