5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
postmodern art professorial forensic opportunism, June 10, 2009
This review is from: Ritualistic Crime Scene Investigation (Paperback)
Dawn Perlmutter, a former Professor of Art, and NYU graduate typifies
the CSI effect whereby dilletantes believe themselves to be Crime
Scene Investigators and Forensic Scientists because they will themselves
to be and they see a commercial and salutory opening to advance themselves in a heretofore uncluttered niche (thus the basis for why
forensic science specialties and subspecialties have clamped down
on 'amateurism' and instituted strcter testing and licensing requirements for forensic practices in crime labs, police departments
and medical examiner's offices).
This book, like Perlmutter's earlier crude amateurish treatise on
ritualistic murders (why on Earth would CRC agree to publish such
rubbish ?), demonstrates a facile, dilletantish, non-scientific
and less-than-cosmopolitan understanding of ritualized criminal
activity, whether psycopathic, religious-based, geopolitical or
merely opportunistic. This book might be worthwhile (along with
her earlier publication) as a textbook for an elective or non-majors
humanities department course in the art or symbolism (phenology or
semiotics) of criminal activity, but it falsely purports to have any use
as a forensic or criminological tool in the understanding of
ritualized behavior that may lead to murder of any scale. You
are far better off reading the published work and books by
forensic psychologist Eric Hickey, or the legion of trained
FBI, state crime lab and other specialized forensic scientists
and psychologists who have ACTUAL scientific grounding in the
area of ritualized criminal behavior.
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