Rating: 
Summary: an excellent book
Review: first of all,i dont think john is arrogant,he simply tells it as it is.this book is so great that as soon as i got the book,i couldnt put it down till i read the whole book.he explains the diferent types of 'phychos' and their characteristics.anyone who reads this will get a great inside on these criminals.and plus,he gives the readers a chance to detect the offenders in the last chapter.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating!
Review: First off, I'll tell you why I dislike the book.
A) Not enough pages! I took me 3 days to read this book cover to cover, and I'm dying to know more!
B) Transitions: It's hard to know when Mr. Douglas begins talking about another suspect. I usually got about 2 paragraphs along before I realized he wasn't talking about the person I thought he was.Now, I'll tell you the reasons why I like this book. It is a learning experience. So many times you will learn about a new personality and why they have their personalities. Mr. Douglas gives background on all suspects, not just their crimes, but describes into detail their childhood lives. Afterwards, he will start analyzing them trying to figure out their motive (hence the name of the book). In other stories, he will talk about the crime before telling you who it is, using his profiling techniques to single out people who committed the crimes they did, and then why. Another thing about this book is it makes you (or at least me) start looking at people you know in a different light. I actually started profiling folks I knew, figuring out who would be a serial killer, spree killer, mass murderer, arsonist, assasin or bomber! It's really quite a cool book! If you're looking for interesting, mysterious, and "you can't take your hands off this" type books, this is one to add to your collection. It is the first (of many) John Douglas books I will be purchasing. You definitely need to check this one out! Take notes, while you're at it!
Rating: 
Summary: John Douglas - Mindhunter
Review: Having read all the Douglas et al books I have to say that I find his work fascinating, though it lacks the psychological insight of someone like Paul Britton, a British forensic psychologist (author of "The Jigsaw Man" Corgi,1997; and "Picking Up The Pieces" Corgi, 2000). I have heard Douglas described as arrogant - but given his expertise, his compassion for the victims, and his desire to amass as much information on signature killers (Bob Keppel's description) in order to attempt to understand and try to head them off - I have to agree that some of the arrogance is deserved. The books are full of detail about the horrendous cruelty that we seem to see and hear so much of, the terrible pain of the victim's families and, thankfully, attempts to understand and explain what motivates these predators. Overall his books are a must for anyone who is interested in why, rather than how, these monsters prey on us. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Very informative, as all their books have been.
Review: I am a psychology student and very much interested in abnormal/criminal psychology. I find this book interesting and very enlightening. I have purchased several other books by these authors and am presently reading "Mind Hunter". I would like to see a book with more examples and more forensic details which aid the profiler in makeing his/her profile. I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: BEST book I have ever read!
Review: I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the BEST book I have ever read. I am a true crime buff, and a Criminal Justice major, so I loved the book to read for pleasure (which, by the way, I read about 5 times!) and then I use it as a reference to write papers for school! It rules! It describes different types of crimes, gives examples of these crimes, and then the profiling of the perps, and when applicable, the capture of the subject. The book is well written, keeps your attention throughout the entire thing, and is, well, quite frank about the crimes. The profiles are astonishingly accurate, and extremely interesting! I highly recommend this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Profiling John Douglas
Review: I clearly am not in the target audience for John Douglas's 'Anatomy of Motive'. I picked up this book thinking it was a scientific look at how mentally ill criminals think. What I read, while interesting, is such a far cry from what I consider science that to name it such would be paramount to calling a stapler a chicken. This is emphatically not to say that this is a bad book. I found the look into the mind of a profiler very interesting, and even managed to learn a bit about what he does. The thing I take issue with is the constant references Douglas makes to his subjects as 'losers', 'cowards,' or 'creeps'. These people are, to begin with, mentally ill. While their crimes are undoubtedly awful, they should be judged in the context of pathology, not morality. I can't imagine why Douglas feels the need to remind us that it is wrong to eviscerate a woman and leave her corpse under a woodshed. I know this already, thank you. Equally irritating is the manner in which Douglas ignores two glaring facts. The first is that the most brutal of the crimes described in the book were carried out by individuals either enlisted in the armed forces or retired therefrom. It seems that Mr. Douglas's own military background hinders him from seeing a pattern of violence connected to the military. Then again, maybe these folks are just losers. The second is that his 'dominate, manipulate, and control' formula is a fair description of the goals of most corporate CEOs. If one is going to moralize, they should acknowledge that the violence that these offenders commit has at least some relation to the very values our society celebrates. To play these very sick people off as 'losers' ignores that their illness is the logical extension of our own. Of course, this sort of statement does not belong in a book purporting to be about the science of criminal profiling. What are appropriate here are a description of a crime, and how the profiler determined what sort of personality the offender has. I would think that labeling the "'UNSUB" a 'loser' would hinder the objective analysis necessary to find him. While there is enough of the kind of information I wanted to keep me reading, I couldn't help feeling like I'd just been preached to. If Douglas had left out his completely unnecessary pedantic rambling, this book would have been about fifty pages shorter. It also would have been more interesting. In the end, I felt that the main person who had been profiled was John Douglas.
Rating:
Summary: Prompting your Sense of Insufficiency
Review: I read this book back to back during the past few days and it was the first book by Douglas that I have read. While fairly impressed by the author's approach (both in theory and in practice), to some of the most notorious crimes and criminals, I felt there were several things that need to be pointed out. (1)Self-oriented. I would not terribly disagree if one said in this book, Mr. Douglas was too much ego-driven and self-glorifying. It seemed for all the cases covered, on the other end of the justice scale opposite to the criminals, there was only Mr. Douglas whose penetrating force in bringing them to justice, at least His theories of profiling were. (2) Insufficient case files. Virtually all the cases covered in this book are outdated and hugely well known that publicized information of them means nothing much than a news report. To my recollection, the average age of these cases was somewhere between 15 to 20 years ago. In today's fast driven society with progressive crime diversifications, this is hardly enough for a starter's course. (3)Basic. While retaining my tremendous respect to the author and his book, I felt the materials presented here were over simplified and sometimes far more insufficient than they should be. I acknowledge the argument that nothing sophisticated could be well expressed in just over 400 pages, but I do feel the limitation and insufficiency of the author as an interdisciplinary scholar a great number of times during the book. (4)One View Street. Simply stated, the author did not elaborate any alternatives to his "profiling' in catching some of the most sophisticated criminals, despite the importance of these alternatives in both the theory and the field. I was somewhat even offended when Mr. Douglas devoted only one and a half pages to the JFK Assassination, determining, based on the "physical and forensic" evidence, that President Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald and Oswald alone. He declared him to be just another "paranoid loser" who happened to be able to murder the president, how convenient! Interestingly, the historical and political aspects, which are in fact the very foundation of this heinous crime, did not even come into subject! Despite of the fact that Mr. Douglas was still a very young man and certainly an outsider of the FBI at the time, he implied to blame, more or less scornfully, a paranoid public in believing a "conspiracy theory", which the government bureaucracy could and would, in no way to hold up. In a landmark effort, the History Channel presented its most mesmerizing program to date, "The Men who Killed Kennedy" (DVDs available at Amazon). Virtually all aspects of that programs, in a six-hour stride, contradict Mr. Douglas' one and a half pages' view on the event of the twentieth century America. (5)Compromising - in detail. During the late chapters, when John Hinckley Jr. came into the subject, one inevitable spotlight was focused on Jodie Foster. While her early highly irresponsible and totally ignorant remarks of "encouragement" to Hinckley that without any doubt, partially prompted his attempt on the life of President Reagan, Mr. Douglas asserted her behavior to be ONLY "courteous". The reason, in a separate paragraph that ended the discussion (I did sense that earlier), Mr. Douglas told that he was pleased by the advice he offered to the actress during the filming of the Silence of the Lambs, inconceivable, but true. Of course, one without a legendary record in crime fighting would have known, that Foster's attitude toward Hinckley was anything other than "courteous" in a legal sense! Overall, I would believe without the above drawbacks, the book could have been a better effort. However, I recommend this book to those interested in the subject and/or law enforcement officers, as a good starter on a never-ending journey into crime fighting.
Rating:
Summary: Prompting your Sense of Insufficiency
Review: I read this book back to back during the past few days and it was the first book by Douglas that I have read. While fairly impressed by the author's unique way of approaching (both in theory and in practice) some of the most notorious crimes and criminals, I felt there were several things that need to be pointed out. (1) Self-oriented. I would not terribly disagree if one said in this book, Mr. Douglas was too much ego-driven and self-glorifying. It seemed for all the cases covered, on the other end of the justice scale opposite to the criminals, there was only Mr. Douglas whose penetrating force in bringing them to justice, at least His theories of profiling were. (2) Insufficient case files. Virtually all the cases covered in this book are outdated and hugely well known that publicized information of them means nothing much than a news report. To my recollection, the average age of these cases was somewhere between 15 to 20 years. In today's fast driven society with progressive crime diversifications, this is hardly enough for a starter's course. (3) Basic. While retaining my tremendous respect to the author and his book, I felt the materials presented here were over simplified and sometimes far more insufficient than they should be. I acknowledge the argument that nothing sophisticated could be well expressed in just over 400 pages, but I did feel the limitation and insufficiency of the author as an interdisciplinary scholar a great number of times during the book. (4) One View Street. Simply stated, the author did not elaborate any alternatives to his "profiling' in catching some of the most sophisticated criminals, despite the importance of these alternatives in both the theory and the field. I was somewhat even offended when Mr. Douglas devoted only one and a half pages to the JFK Assassination, determining, based on the "physical and forensic" evidence, that President Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald and Oswald alone. He declared him to be just another "paranoid loser" who happened to be able to murder the president, how convenient! Interestingly, the historical and political aspects, which were in fact the very foundation of this heinous crime, did not even come into subject! Despite of the fact that Mr. Douglas was still a very young man and certainly an outsider of the FBI at the time, he implied to blame, more or less scornfully, a paranoid public in believing a "conspiracy theory", to which the government bureaucracy could and would, in no way to hold up. In a landmark effort, the History Channel presented its most mesmerizing program to date, "The Men who Killed Kennedy" (DVDs available at Amazon). Virtually all aspects of that programs, in a six-hour stride, contradict Mr. Douglas' one and a half pages' view on the event of the twentieth century America. (5) Compromising - in detail. During the late chapters, when John Hinckley Jr. came into the subject, one inevitable spotlight was focused on Jodie Foster. While her early highly irresponsible and totally ignorant remarks of "encouragement" to Hinckley that without any doubt, partially prompted his attempt on the life of President Reagan, Mr. Douglas asserted her behavior to be ONLY "courteous". The reason, in a separate paragraph that ended the discussion, Mr. Douglas told that he was pleased by the advice he offered to the actress during the filming of the Silence of the Lambs, inconceivable, but true. Of course, one without a legendary record in crime fighting would have known, that Foster's attitude toward Hinckley was anything other than "courteous" in a legal sense! Overall, I would believe without the above drawbacks, the book could have been a better effort. However, I recommend this book to those interested in the subject and/or law enforcement officers, as a good starter on a never-ending journey into crime fighting.
Rating:
Summary: why [take advantage of] an 80 year old woman?
Review: i wouldn't know for sure, but what i CAN tell you is that this book keeps me reading. and man, i hate reading. its not a trashy novel or a comic book, but it is pretty fascinating. i would say if you want to read books, but just can't stay interested in the classics, and are tired of post-modern (or whatever phrase means weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) authors trying to one-up each other or rip-off pulp fiction for the millionth time, give this book a read. you will learn something that actually interests you! luckily i got a ... factory ... copy, but it reads just fine.
Rating:
Summary: why [take advantage of] an 80 year old woman?
Review: i wouldn't know for sure, but what i CAN tell you is that this book keeps me reading. and man, i hate reading. its not a trashy novel or a comic book, but it is pretty fascinating. i would say if you want to read books, but just can't stay interested in the classics, and are tired of post-modern (or whatever phrase means weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) authors trying to one-up each other or rip-off pulp fiction for the millionth time, give this book a read. you will learn something that actually interests you! luckily i got a ... factory ... copy, but it reads just fine.
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