A bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the business of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them in this wild adventure. The Psychopath Test is an enthralling voyage inside the minds of psychopaths. Jon Ronson's investigation into a possible hoax perpetrated on the world's finest neurologists leads him unintentionally into the lunacy industry. Ronson is taught how to recognize high-flying persons by looking for little telltale verbal and nonverbal cues by an influential psychologist who believes many successful CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths. As a result, Ronson approaches the corridors of power, armed with his new psychopath-spotting powers. He spends time with a death-squad leader incarcerated in Coxsackie, New York, for mortgage fraud; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been talked about in the news; and a patient in a criminally insane asylum who insists he's sane and surely not a psychopath. Ronson not only uncovers the mystery of the hoax, but also realizes, to his dismay, that the individuals at the helm of the lunacy industry are sometimes just as insane as those they study, with their own drives and obsessions. And that the maddest edges are increasingly defining relatively ordinary people.
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
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