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Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical, engaging, astonishing and useful book.
Review: .--Stout writes with lyric sensitivity and grace about those who have no ability to feel love, remorse, guilt, or joy. Oddly these are some of the most engaging people we will ever meet. Sociopaths, Stout tells us, are as common as virus. It is virtually inevitable that the rest of us have encountered them...or will. Sociopaths are dangerous. An intimate association with a sociopath carries its own warranty of being a party to a train wreck. Sociopaths can feign every kind of emotion; yet they know but feral pleasures. Sociopaths find rewards in the hunt. Their joys are in conquest and winning. They understand love, but can't feel it. Hence, sociopaths are condemned like the Flying Dutchman of legend to cruise the shoals of real emotion as distant observers, never finding the safe harbor of family, lasting friendship, or love. Stout's work is especially useful for victims. Those who have experienced a sociopath-- a neighbor who seems perpetual unwelcoming, a family member who never feels remorse, a boss who has stolen our ideas, a lover who could never be pleased, but worked instead to unsettle and bedevil-- will recognize Stout's finely etched and frightening characters. From this riveting book, we can now know just how distressingly ordinary was our experience. There is always comfort in finding a name for what is rightfully seen as an unsettling--or, as it is in some sociopathic iterations [eg, the Ted Bundys of the world]-- a terrifying encounter. For the rest of us, this book is a graceful, haunting, and useful admonition that evil is all too common; and it is carried within those charming, bright, accomplished, seductive, and dangerous people we all know, or will.
Rating: 
Summary: Sociopaths defined--to a point
Review: Funny, the misconceptions most of us have of sociopaths. Some of us view them, merely, as a gross-out Danny DeVito type who would delight in his "Throw Mama From The Train" role. Some think of them, simply, in relation to a cerebral, perpetually distracted quality (perhaps due to their own perceived brilliance). Others are reminded of a scene that might be from an Italian movie of the 1960s. A few even assign the oversimplified, visionary, "genius" identification:having thughts others dare not have. Very few of us have ever really gotten a handle on what a sociopath actually is. ##### Martha Stout's book takes a giant step in this problem-solving direction. The love, remorse, guilt, joy trappings are well explored, covered, and analyzed, in depth. Characterizations are painted in frightening detail. From exhaustive (layman's) research on the subject, though, including incorporating the distilled wisdom of dead people, I don't feel she has gone quite far enough. Portrait of a sociopathic personality should also include their addictions. In many cases this seems to encompass multiple addictions, such as a sciopathic male, for example, being not only an alcoholic, womanizer, and gamblerholic, as well as a firm believer that ignorance is universal and eternal, therefore conducting his / her life accordingly. ##### I am also a bit surprised to find that Martha Stout believes this affliction represents but 4% of the population. I would think the figure would be closer to 10%. (But, who am i? I am the first to admit, I still don't understand the scope, depth, or "reach" of the problem). ##### These distinguishable shortcomings are slight, however. Overall, I found this book a well-done, fascinating study of a much misunderstood character shortcoming in our society.
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