Profiling Violent Crimes: An Investigative Tool
Ronald M. Holmes - 1989
New chapters cover criminal behavior theories and psychological profiling; autoerotic deaths, and occult crimes, plus two new chapters detailing infamous unsolved crimes/criminals: Jack the Ripper and the Jon Benet Ramsey case. The authors′ continuing research and activities in the field result in a multitude of new case studies for this book, often included as boxed inserts.
Tales from the Couch: A Clinical Psychologist’s True Stories of Psychopathology
Bob Wendorf - 2015
Drawn from Dr. Bob Wendorf’s thirty-six-year career years as a clinical psychologist, the book examines the lives of some of his most troubled patients, in a project that aims to both educate and fascinate the reader. Clinical syndromes are described and dramatized by real-life case examples (altered only as necessary to protect patient confidentiality).Each of the sixteen chapters focuses on a particular psychiatric diagnosis, including Multiple Personality Disorder, Asperger’s, and ADD. The clinical picture and symptoms are described and explained, then brought to life by case examples taken from the author’s practice. Dr. Wendorf presents the cases as a series of narratives—some dramatic, some humorous, most quite poignant. Along the way, the author offers his own reactions to the people and events described here and application to the general human condition as well.Tales from the Couch offers compelling stories of extraordinary people, clinical conditions, and events—both in and out of the therapy hour—while providing insights into the nature of human beings, mental illness, and the psychotherapeutic enterprise.
The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison - 2014
She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.
Confessions of a Childfree Woman: A Life Spent Swimming Against the Mainstream
Marcia Drut-Davis - 2013
Now, in her stirring new memoir Confessions of a Childfree Woman, Drut-Davis tells the story behind that national TV appearance and recounts the painful aftermath.Along the way, Drut-Davis exposes and explores our culture’s rampant pronatalism and the stigma we continue to attach to childless women. By taking us deep into her own life and the emotions—positive and negative—surrounding her bold choice, Drut-Davis lays bare our society’s myth that true fulfillment and happiness can come only through procreation.Reflecting on her 70 years, Drut-Davis takes a fair look at what she’s lost by not having children, but her focus always returns to all she has gained: a life lived with no regrets.
The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness
Lori Schiller - 1994
Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.In this new edition, Lori Schiller recounts the dramatic years following the original publication -- a period involving addiction, relapse, and ultimately, love and recovery.Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage.
The Silent Twins
Marjorie Wallace - 1986
As they grew up, love, hate, and genius united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five-week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a grueling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor.Award-winning investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace delves into the twins' silent world, revealing their genius, alienation, and the mystic bond by which the extremes of good and evil ended in possession and death.
Together: A Journey for Survival
Ann Arnold - 2016
Married to the man of her dreams, mother to two beautiful children, and a member of one of the most respected families in town; she had it all. The year was 1939, and the world was about to change. In a heartbreaking instant, she had to trade her life of security, family, and simple pleasures--for one of unspeakable loneliness, hardship, and danger. Nothing more than hunted prey, she relied on her inner strength and indomitable will to keep her children alive. But would it be enough? How far would she have to go, and did she have the resolve to get there? One thing she knew for sure ...she and her children would live or die one way …. TOGETHER. Manek was six years old when his world began to collapse. At first, his young eyes failed to see it, but reality came quickly into focus, when his loving gentle mother was forced to beat him in order to save his life. That is when he realized the Nazis wanted to kill him. Suddenly thrust into a new role as man of the house, would he be able to help keep his family safe? Was he strong enough to protect them? He knew only one thing ... they would survive if they could stay …TOGETHER. In Together: A Journey for Survival, Ann Arnold shares her family's journey through Poland's countryside as a war of nations thunders around them. The story displays the magnificent strength of a mother's love and the incredible courage of good people during the worst of times. "An important work. Ann Arnold's effort to both tell their tale of her family's survival during the Holocaust while being a part of encouraging the next generation to embrace tolerance is inspiring." -Michael Cohen, The Simon Wiesenthal Center "A fascinating story that takes a reader inside an already wounded family toiling through horrific difficulty in the pursuit of life itself. .. it forces readers to ask themselves if they could endure a struggle or whether they might support another person in a life or death battle. This angle makes the book valuable for teachers to use and beneficial for students to read at the high school level.” -Lawrence M. Glaser, N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education “Incredible Story” –Northern Valley Press "Arnold’s perspective is colored not only by those non-Jews who saved her father’s family but also by her experience visiting Brzostek as an adult." –New Jersey Jewish News
Fury: A Memoir
Koren Zailckas - 2010
But a psychological legacy of repression lingers-her sobriety is a loose surface layer atop a hard- packed, unacknowledged rage that wreaks havoc on Koren emotionally and professionally. When a failed relationship leads Koren back to her childhood home, she sinks into an emotional crisis writer's block, depression, anxiety. Only when she begins to apply her research on a book about anger to the turmoil of her own life does she learn what denial has cost her. The result is a blisteringly honest chronicle of the consequences of anger displaced and the balm of anger discovered. Readers who recognized themselves or someone they love in the pages of Smashed will identify with Koren's life-altering exploration and the necessity of exposing anger's origins in order to flourish in love and life as an adult. Combining sophisticated sociological research with a dramatic and deeply personal story that grapples boldly with identity and family, Fury is a dazzling work by a young writer at the height of her powers that is certain to touch a cultural nerve.
Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like
Rosalind B. Penfold - 2005
Penfold is an appealing, successful thirty-five-year-old businesswoman running her own company when her parents, worried that she works too hard, invite her to a country picnic-party one weekend. There she meets widower Brian and is swept off her feet. Romantic and exuberant, with four loving children, Brian seems like everything a woman could possibly want, and Roz falls deeply in love. But soon Roz begins to notice troubling signs that Brian is not what he seems. A pattern of lies and petty cruelties begins to emerge that, over the course of their decade together, comes to encompass a litany of physical, mental, and sexual abuse appalling in its scope and malevolence. Often too traumatized and ashamed to admit the true extent of what she is experiencing, Roz instead pours her anguish into a series of graphic diaries that provide a touching, profoundly shocking, and completely original portrait of domestic abuse.An extraordinary visual testimony, Dragonslippers presents the many warning signs of abuse and offers a frank examination of the psychology of both abusers and victims. Above all, this is the story of a woman who fights for and finds the strength to break free.
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Michael Lewis - 2016
One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
Triumph
Carolyn Jessop - 2010
The author of Escape, which detailed her escape along with her eight children from the cult she had been raised in, the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, follows up on the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which her ex-husband ran for Warren Jeffs on a sprawling 1,700-acre ranch near Eldorado, Texas.
Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez
Philip Carlo - 1996
The shocking true story behind the serial killer case that inspired the hit Netflix series!Painstakingly researched over three years, based on nearly one hundred hours of exclusive interviews with Richard Ramirez on California's Death Row, The Night Stalker is the definitive account of America's most feared serial murderer.From Ramirez's earliest brushes with the law to his deadliest stalking expeditions to the unprecedented police and civilian manhunt that resulted in one of the most sensational trials in California history, The Night Stalker is an eerie and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.It is more than epic nonfiction at its most brutally real - it is true crime masterpiece.
The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination
Jessica Benjamin - 1988
She reveals that domination is a complex psychological process which ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, and shows how it underlies our family life, our social institutions, and especially our sexual relations, in spite of our conscious commitment to equality and freedom.
Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding
Jessie Sholl - 2010
Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me?When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it's compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter's powerful memoir of confronting her mother's disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother's home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship before it's too late.Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn't like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother's hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder's treasures. With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.
History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life
Jill Bialosky - 2011
It always gives me a good feeling to see other people happy. . . . It is so easy to achieve.” —Kim’s journal entry, May 3, 1988 On the night of April 15, 1990, Jill Bialosky’s twenty-one-year-old sister Kim came home from a bar in downtown Cleveland. She argued with her boyfriend on the phone. Then she took her mother’s car keys, went into the garage, closed the garage door. She climbed into the car, turned on the ignition, and fell asleep. Her body was found the next morning by the neighborhood boy her mother hired to cut the grass. Those are the simple facts, but the act of suicide is anything but simple. For twenty years, Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by Kim’s suicide. Now, in a remarkable work of literary nonfiction, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life, the events and emotions that led her to take her life on this particular night. In doing so, she opens a window on the nature of suicide itself, our own reactions and responses to it—especially the impact a suicide has on those who remain behind. Combining Kim’s diaries with family history and memoir, drawing on the works of doctors and psychologists as well as writers from Melville and Dickinson to Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens, Bialosky gives us a stunning exploration of human fragility and strength. She juxtaposes the story of Kim’s death with the challenges of becoming a mother and her own exuberant experience of raising a son. This is a book that explores all aspects of our familial relationships—between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters—but particularly the tender and enduring bonds between sisters. History of a Suicide brings a crucial and all too rarely discussed subject out of the shadows, and in doing so gives readers the courage to face their own losses, no matter what those may be. This searing and compassionate work reminds us of the preciousness of life and of the ways in which those we love are inextricably bound to us.