Confessions of a Sociopath

Author: M.E. Thomas
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307956660
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
The memoir of a high-functioning, law-abiding (well, mostly) sociopath and a roadmap—right from the source—for dealing with the sociopath in your life. “[A] gripping and important book . . . revelatory . . . quite the memorable roller coaster ride.”—The New York Times Book Review As M.E. Thomas says of her fellow sociopaths, “We are your neighbors, your coworkers, and quite possibly the people closest to you: lovers, family, friends. Our risk-seeking behavior and general fearlessness are thrilling, our glibness and charm alluring. Our often quick wit and outside-the-box thinking make us appear intelligent—even brilliant. We climb the corporate ladder faster than the rest, and appear to have limitless self-confidence. Who are we? We are highly successful, noncriminal sociopaths and we comprise 4 percent of the American population.” Confessions of a Sociopath—part confessional memoir, part primer for the curious—takes readers on a journey into the mind of a sociopath, revealing what makes them tick while debunking myths about sociopathy and offering a road map for dealing with the sociopaths in your life. M. E. Thomas draws from her own experiences as a diagnosed sociopath; her popular blog, Sociopathworld; and scientific literature to unveil for the very first time these men and women who are “hiding in plain sight.”

Confessions of a Sociopath

Author: M. E. Thomas
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0283071907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
The bold memoir from a diagnosed sociopath. Shocking but funny, Confessions of a Sociopath is a fascinating insight into the mind of a self-confessed predator. 'Gripping and important . . . quite the memorable roller coaster ride' – Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test M. E. Thomas is a high-functioning non-criminal sociopath. She is charismatic, ambitious and successful. You would be charmed by her if you met her, might even be seduced by her. You would not realize that she is studying you to find your flaws, that she is ruthlessly manipulative, has no empathy and does not feel guilt or remorse. But she does like people – she likes to touch them, mould them and ruin them. She could be your friend or your boss. She could be you . . . Now she writes with breathtaking honesty about her life. She also draws on the latest research to explain why at least one in twenty-five of us are sociopaths – and shows why that's not a bad thing.

Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber

Author: Adele Lang
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466872195
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
After weasel-eyed tax inspectors question her work-related claims, Katya Livingston is forced to keep a financial diary. As well as documenting the cruel and parsimonious ways of her ad agency boss, Katya waxes lyrical about putting up with loser friends, mortal enemies, and thoroughly bad restaurants. She also throws in a completely candid account of her love life, just in case some of it is tax deductible. What begins as a private account of expenses rapidly becomes, through Katya's chronic delusions of grandeur, a matter of public record: first as a tawdry gossip column, then as a salacious book, and finally as a Hollywood B-movie. Bitingly written with wit and style reminiscent of Candace Bushnell, Adèle Lang's Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber is a cutting, bitchy, hilarious take on the young-single-British-woman genre.

The Psychopath Inside

Author: James Fallon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101603925
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
“Compelling, essential reading for understanding the underpinnings of psychopathy.” — M. E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath For his first fifty-eight years, James Fallon was by all appearances a normal guy. A successful neuroscientist and professor, he’d been raised in a loving family, married his high school sweetheart, and had three kids and lots of friends. Then he learned a shocking truth that would not only disrupt his personal and professional life, but would lead him to question the very nature of his own identity. While researching serial killers, he uncovered a pattern in their brain scans that helped explain their cold and violent behavior. Astonishingly, his own scan matched that pattern. And a few months later he learned that he was descended from a long line of murderers. Fallon set out to reconcile the truth about his own brain with everything he knew as a scientist about the mind, behavior, and personality.

The Sociopath Next Door

Author: Martha Stout, Ph.D.
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 0767920201
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Who is the devil you know? Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband? Your sadistic high school gym teacher? Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings? The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own? In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too. We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt. How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win. The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game. It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.

The Psychopath Test

Author: Jon Ronson
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447202503
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
What if society wasn't fundamentally rational, but was motivated by insanity? This thought sets Jon Ronson on an utterly compelling adventure into the world of madness. Along the way, Jon meets psychopaths, those whose lives have been touched by madness and those whose job it is to diagnose it, including the influential psychologist who developed the Psychopath Test, from whom Jon learns the art of psychopath-spotting. A skill which seemingly reveals that madness could indeed be at the heart of everything . . . Combining Jon Ronson's trademark humour, charm and investigative incision, The Psychopath Test is both entertaining and honest, unearthing dangerous truths and asking serious questions about how we define normality in a world where we are increasingly judged by our maddest edges. 'The belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny . . . provocative and interesting' – Observer

Baby Teeth

Author: Zoje Stage
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125017077X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
One of Entertainment Weekly’s Must-Read Books for July | People Magazine's Book of the Week | One of Bustle's "Fifteen Books With Chilling Protagonists That Will Keep You Guessing" | One of PopSugar's "25 Must-Read Books That Will Make July Fly By!" | One of the "Biggest Thrillers of the Summer"—SheReads | A Barnes and Noble Blog Best Thriller for July! | "New & Noteworthy" —USA Today | "Summer 2018 Must-Read"—Bookish | "One of 11 Crime Novels You Should Read in July"—Crime Reads | "Best Summer Reads for 2018"—Publishers Weekly | "The Five Best Horror Books of 2018-2019"—Forbes "Gripping"—InStyle "Propulsive."—New York Times Book Review "A wholly original and terrifically creepy story."—Refinery29 "A twisty, delirious read"—EntertainmentWeekly.com "A deliciously creepy read."—New York Post MEET HANNA: Seven-year-old Hanna is a sweet-but-silent angel in the eyes of her adoring father Alex. He’s the only person who understands her. But her mother Suzette stands in her way, and she’ll try any trick she can think of to get rid of her. Ideally for good. MEET SUZETTE: Suzette loves her daughter, but after years of expulsions and strained home schooling, her precarious health and sanity are weakening day by day. She’s also becoming increasingly frightened by Hanna’s little games, while her husband Alex remains blind to the failing family dynamics. Soon, Suzette starts to fear that maybe their supposedly innocent baby girl may have a truly sinister agenda. A battle of wills between mother and daughter reveals the frailty and falsehood of familial bonds in award-winning playwright and filmmaker Zoje Stage’s tense novel of psychological suspense, Baby Teeth. “Unnerving and unputdownable, Baby Teeth will get under your skin and keep you trapped in its chilling grip until the shocking conclusion.”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline “We Need to Talk About Kevin meets Gone Girl meets The Omen...a twisty, delirious read that will constantly question your sympathies for the two characters as their bond continues to crumble.”—Entertainment Weekly “A pulse-spiking thriller.”—PopSugar

The Psychopath Whisperer

Author: Kent A. Kiehl, PhD
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0770435858
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
A compelling journey into the science and behavior of psychopaths, written by the leading scientist in the field of criminal psychopathy. We know of psychopaths from chilling headlines and stories in the news and movies—from Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, to Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. As Dr. Kent Kiehl shows, psychopaths can be identified by a checklist of symptoms that includes pathological lying; lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse; grandiose sense of self-worth; manipulation; and failure to accept one’s actions. But why do psychopaths behave the way they do? Is it the result of their environment— how they were raised—or is there a genetic component to their lack of conscience? This is the question Kiehl, a protégé of famed psychopath researcher Dr. Robert Hare, was determined to answer as he began his career twenty years ago. To aid in his quest to unravel the psychopathic mind, Kiehl created the first mobile functional MRI scanner to study psychopaths in prison populations. The brains of more than five hundred psychopaths and three thousand other offenders have been scanned by Kiehl’s laboratory—the world’s largest forensic neuroscience repository of its kind. Over the course of The Psychopath Whisperer, we follow the scientific bread crumbs that Kiehl uncovered to show that the key brain structures that correspond with emotional engagement and reactions are diminished in psychopaths, offering new clues to how to predict and treat the disorder. In The Psychopath Whisperer, Kiehl describes in fascinating detail his years working with psychopaths and studying their thought processes— from the remorseless serial killers he meets with behind bars to children whose behavior and personality traits exhibit the early warning signs of psychopathy. Less than 1 percent of the general population meets the criteria for psychopathy. But psychopaths account for a vastly outsized proportion of violent crimes. And as Kiehl shows, many who aren’t psychopaths exhibit some of the behaviors and traits associated with the condition. What do you do if you discover your roommate, or boss, or the person you are dating has traits that define a psychopath? And what does having a diminished limbic region of the brain mean for how the legal system approaches crimes committed by psychopaths? A compelling narrative of cutting-edge science, The Psychopath Whisperer will open your eyes on a fascinating but little understood world, with startling implications for society, the law, and our personal lives.

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

Author: Alison Arngrim
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062000101
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch is Alison Arngrim’s comic memoir of growing up as one of television’s most memorable characters—the devious Nellie Oleson on the hit television show Little House on the Prairie. With behind-the-scenes stories from the set, as well as tales from her bohemian upbringing in West Hollywood and her headline-making advocacy work on behalf of HIV awareness and abused children, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch is a must for fans of everything Little House: the classic television series and its many stars like Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert; Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Prairie Tale... and, of course, the beloved series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder that started it all.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths

Author: Kevin Dutton
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
ISBN: 0385677197
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Psychopath. The word conjurs up images of serial killers, rapists, suicide bombers, gangsters. But think again: you could probably benefit from being a little more psychopathic yourself. Psychologist Kevin Dutton has made a speciality of psychopathy, and is on first-name terms with many notorious killers. But unlike those incarcerated psychopaths, and all those depicted in movies and crime fiction, most are not violent, he explains. In fact, says Prof Dutton, they have a lot of good things going for them. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic and focused--qualities tailor-made for success in today's society. The Wisdom of Psychopaths is an intellectual rollercoaster ride that combines lightning-hot science with unprecedented access to secret monasteries, Special Forces training camps, and high-security hospitals. In it, you will meet serial killers, war heroes, financiers, movie stars and attorneys--and discover that beneath the hype and popular characterization, psychopaths have something to teach us. Like the knobs on a mixing deck, psychopathy is graded. And finding the right combination of psychopathic traits, sampled and mixed at carefully calibrated volumes, can put us ahead of the game.