The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson, 2011)

I'm enjoying the novelty of reaching the halfway point of my reading goal well before mid-year (this post is coming much later than the book completion date!). This book had been on my list a long time. In fact, two years ago there was a comment on Goodreads asking me what I thought of the book. So it was a long time coming.

Jon Ronson, through his three books, is a master of the "stranger than fiction" subcategory of non-fiction. I read Them: Adventures with Extremists a number of years ago and recall marveling at how Ronson was able to insert himself among such strange and explosive events and personalities. Perhaps because I was scarred (and scared) by the negative reviews of the movie, I never tackled The Men Who Stare At Goats, but when I heard he was tackling the whacked out world of sociopaths, I thought "sign me up!" The book starts out simply enough, with a mysterious book being delivered completely unsolicited to various people that, frankly, doesn't make any sense at all. From his curiosity over what type of person would do this, he ends up meeting folks like the "sane" man locked up in the UK's most notorious asylum, a twisted Haitian terrorist, a ruthless businessman, and, even more eye-opening, the people who attempted to "cure" and "identify" these sociopaths, including Bob Hare, the creator of the Psychopath Test. All the while, lurking in the back of his mind, Ronson wonders if world leaders need to be at least a little bit sociopathic to be the people that they are.

The book reads very quickly and I highly recommend it to those who like their nonfiction done strange, as well as those interested in the quirks of Scientology, because, guess what, the scientologists are featured here, though in more of a "supporting" role.