I've been reading this book over the last few days. Quite intriguing really. Essentially it purports to be an investigation into machivellian personalities, inspired by the author's sister, who sounds like a fully fledged psychopath to me. Much of the material is quite technical and relates to brain chemistry and biology. There is a strong focus on borderline personality disorders and ao studies on psychopathy and machievellian personalities and whether there is a similarity between these types, ar they in fact the same. She says not. Interesting that she does not reference the more common material on psychopaths - Marth Stout, O'Hare etc - though.
A lot of the material was really interesting but every so often something comes up which smacks me in the face as clear and obvious cointel. There are a number of examples but the most striking one is when she mentions the 911 conspiracy debunk done by Popular Mechanics. She talks about how the authors of this article discovered that people "prone to Conspiracy Theories" are incapable of changing their views even when confronted by clear evidence to the contrary (makes me wonder if she ever read the PM article or ever investigated any of the 911 theories). That is also very strange as the rest of the material is well researched and exhaustively documented and yet she slips in material like the 911 stuff, perhaps so that people will assume that she has investigated this material deeply as well).
All in all, I would not recommend the book, the mix of truth and lies is a bit too well done for my liking.
A lot of the material was really interesting but every so often something comes up which smacks me in the face as clear and obvious cointel. There are a number of examples but the most striking one is when she mentions the 911 conspiracy debunk done by Popular Mechanics. She talks about how the authors of this article discovered that people "prone to Conspiracy Theories" are incapable of changing their views even when confronted by clear evidence to the contrary (makes me wonder if she ever read the PM article or ever investigated any of the 911 theories). That is also very strange as the rest of the material is well researched and exhaustively documented and yet she slips in material like the 911 stuff, perhaps so that people will assume that she has investigated this material deeply as well).
All in all, I would not recommend the book, the mix of truth and lies is a bit too well done for my liking.
