Review: Stone, The Anatomy of Evil

[truepenny]

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 I've been trying to put my finger on why--he talks about neuroscience and there's nothing noticeably outdated in his understanding of psychopathy and personality disorders.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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Comments

[sovay]

for instance somehow forgetting that Richard Speck raped his eight victims before he butchered them (when that fact is actually germane to his argument)

Different tier?

[truepenny]

He claims that Speck "bound them [the nurses] and held them at gunpoint. When some of them resisted, he killed all eight that he could find" (48).

In point of fact, the nurses DIDN'T resist Speck. The American nurses convinced the Filipina nurses not to. After he'd tied them up, he took them out of the room one by one and raped them before killing them.

So Speck's motivation for murder is not what Stone says it is. And forgetting the rape part of the rape and murder of eight nurses makes me doubt his mastery of his material.

[sovay]

And forgetting the rape part of the rape and murder of eight nurses makes me doubt his mastery of his material.

Understood. And annoying.