Rhodes why they kill

Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb , brings his inimitable vision, exhaustive research, and mesmerizing prose to this timely book that dissects violence and offers new solutions to the age old problem of why people kill.

Lonnie Athens was raised by a brutally domineering father. Defying all odds, Athens became a groundbreaking cri Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb , brings his inimitable vision, exhaustive research, and mesmerizing prose to this timely book that dissects violence and offers new solutions to the age old problem of why people kill. Defying all odds, Athens became a groundbreaking criminologist who turned his scholar's eye to the problem of why people become violent.

After a decade of interviewing several hundred violent convicts--men and women of varied background and ethnicity, he discovered "violentization," the four-stage process by which almost any human being can evolve into someone who will assault, rape, or murder another human being.

Why They Kill is a riveting biography of Athens and a judicious critique of his seminal work, as well as an unflinching investigation into the history of violence. Get A Copy. Paperback , pages.

Published October 10th by Vintage first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions 5. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Why They Kill , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. Sort order. Sep 22, Kim rated it really liked it Shelves: booksread.

It's the most thought-provoking book I've read in a long time, but it's also one of the most frustrating. First of all, to clarify what it is. Richard Rhodes is a professional writer who came across the work of a criminologist named Lonnie Athens. So this book is written by a writer and not a sociologist. Athens has published several books on his own. This book charts both Athens' personal and professional life and his research and theories about violence.

Personally, I think a lot of the flaws of the book come from the fact that it is written by someone who is not an expert in the field and doesn't have any personal knowledge of the social sciences.

The parts of the book that are strongest are the telling of personal stories of violence, the actual overarching theory of the process of violentization, and the sections that apply this theory to historical time periods and war. The sections of the book that I would personally throw out are all the discussions of competing theories and all the effort into discrediting of entire fields of the social sciences like quantitative analysis and all of psyciatry. There's a lot of theoretical gobbledygook in this book, arguing about semantics of theoretical terms that ultimately have little practical use.

I have a social science background and I could barely get through these sections. Ultimately, the book would be stronger if it stopped playing insider baseball and just talked about lived experience and the process of violentization.

While I'm talking about the parts I don't like, I have to deal with this book's antipathy to psychiatry. I have a psychiatric point of view, I freely admit it. I've spent a lot of time sitting and talking with people with severe mental illness and followed their treatment.

I've gone into jails to interview criminals and assess their mental state. I've been responsible to making life and death decisions about whether someone needs to be hospitalized or not, whether they are a threat to themselves or others or not.

And this book really pisses me off in the way it treats both psychiatry and the issue of mental illness. Honestly, the author seems to have an agenda in proving that mental illness doesn't even exist, which is patently absurd. I actually had to skip a few pages because I couldn't bear to read his discussion of how auditory hallucinations aren't a sign of mental illness because we all talk to ourselves and have voices in our head sometimes.

It's such a sign of ignorance and arrogance to think that what people who are mentally ill experience is actually the same as what you experience. Trust me, it isn't. There are people who hear actual voices that actually command them to do things. There are people who actually are paranoid, in a clinical sense, and it's not just a logical result of a violent environment, but a physical sensation that they cannot control. And it doesn't mean the same thing as what you and I mean by paranoid in normal speech.

These are all things that I didn't understand until I had worked closely with people with severe mental illness. I don't disagree with anything to do with Mr. Athens' theory of violentization. I think that most people who are mentally ill and violent have gone through that process.

But I do think that his methodology a priori excludes any criminals who are mentally ill. In his interviews with violent criminals, Athens throws out any case where the subject is obviously lying or saying things that are not consistent with the record of their crimes.

From my experience, taking testimony from severely mentally ill individuals, I'm sure Athens would have thrown out anyone with severe mental illness. So it can't be said for certain if this process always applies to the mentally ill who are violent.

I agree with the book in that I don't think that just because someone is violent that they are mentally ill. I don't think that many psychiatrists would disagree either. If violent people are sometimes given a diagnosis of mental illness and medicated when it is not warranted, I believe that is a result of the political, practical, and bureaucratic model that says that medication is necessary for people who exhibit certain behaviors and that medication can't be given without a diagnosis of certain specific disorders.

And to be fair, there are some crimes that DO argue automatically to an individual's mental illness. I'm thinking of a specific case in Dallas of a woman who cut the arms off her infant child because Jesus appeared on her TV and told her to do so.

It was later discovered she had a brain tumor that caused her illness, but she could have equally had an entirely mental illness based only on her crime. But these are not the people this book discusses. The book deals with people who are habitually and repeatedly violent and how they came to be that way.

The process of violentization is actually fairly simple when you strip it of theoretical gobbledygook. Stage one is brutalization, physical violence either done to the individual or done to someone close to the subject while they watched. Typically this occurs in childhood, though it can happen later. Violent coaching is another required component. Violent coaching is either explicit or implicit encouragement of violent behavior in the subject.

It's the teaching that violence is an appropriate or the only appropriate response to certain provocations. The next stage is belligerency, when the subject decides that to prevent himself from becoming a victim again, he will use serious violence. After that comes violent performances, when the subject begins to act violently. At this stage he can either succeed or fail in his violent performances. If he succeeds, then he must gain benefits from his success at violence.

People give him respect, stop subjecting him to violence, avoid him, give him fame and glory. The final stage is virulency, when the subject decides that violence is the appropriate response to even minor insults or provocations and resolves to use it early and often. An individual must go through all of these stages in order to become ultraviolent and seriously dangerous.

If they turn aside at any point, they may go on to live a normal, non-violent life. But once a person completes all these stages, apparently there is nothing that will change their outlook and behavior. Page Count: Publisher: Knopf. No Comments Yet. More by Richard Rhodes. Page Count: Publisher: Beacon Press. Review Posted Online: Aug. Show all comments. More by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. More About This Book. Unsolved Murders.

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