Jon Ronson, author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, is back with another provocative book, this one all about psychopaths - how to identify them, where they hide, what makes them, and how the psychiatric community has attempted to engage them.



The Psychopath Test is on a major hype tour right now. Its topic is seemingly irresistible to most Americans (I once estimated that the number of fictional serial killers in books alone outnumbers real life serial killers 100 to 1). And the idea of a test you can apply to score someone's level of psychopathy is similarly alluring. It's impossible NOT to start running through the list of everyone you know, playing a rousing game of "Spot the Psychopath." The Hare Test is a 20-point checklist that anyone can understand and employ, for better or worse.

According to estimates, 1 in 100 people is a psychopath, meaning that they score a 30 or above on the eponymous Psychopath Test (technically known as the PCLR). As many as 4 in 100 heads of business are psychopaths, and I assumed that this was the slant the book was going to take: how psychopaths end up as C-level executives, and the repercussions of this. It was a scathing indictment of American corporate culture, this book I imagined. The Psychopath Test is not that book, which frankly is a pity. (I wonder why I thought it was?)



Instead, the book follows Ronson's trademark - and somewhat frustrating - rambling path through a series of only somewhat connected subjects. A large portion of the book is dedicated to one particular person in prison, Tony, perhaps because he was so invested in being interviewed by Ronson. Ronson at several points edges towards a navel-gazing "how can we decide who is mad, when we're all so crazy?" sort of thing, which is regrettable. He follows tangents of psychiatric history so bizarre that the modern-day Scientologists he interviews often come off as the sanest people in the room, which maybe should have been his cue to back away from the weird for a while.



Overall, the book feels only partially baked. Like it could still use another half an hour in the oven. I had the same reaction to The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was another book with a topic so alluring that it helped carry the book through Ronson's personal weaknesses as an author.



One way in which this experience was superior over Men Who Stare At Goats is that Jon Ronson himself reads the audiobook. The Goats audiobook was read by a man with an American accent and a delivery that was full of somewhat heavy-handed bravado. Ronson is a nebbish soul, and hearing his words in his own voice is a much better fit. I don't usually like it when authors read their own books - authors aren't actors, and usually aren't as good at giving an audiobook performance - but in this case, the book was so much about Jon Ronson himself that it wouldn't have worked for someone else to read it.