Customer Reviews

The Two-Edged Sword

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My feelings about this book are decidedly ambivalent, but the split in my opinions seems apt, given the title and the subject matter.
The original reason for ordering the book was to try to gain some insight about Paranoid Personality Disorder, a condition that I believed affected a close friend. On the positive side, the book fulfilled that goal; the descriptions of the behaviors, personality traits, and emotional patterns typical of the disorder were vivid and expressive. The language was "jargon-free" and readable. A short passage on female paranoids was particularly impressive.
On the negative side, the operant word may be "short." The best information fills only about the first 40 or so pages, and the remaining two-thirds of the text is devoted to describing the paranoid traits of famous figures in history (JP Morgan, Huey P. Long, J Edgar Hoover, Hitler, etc.) used as examples to support the thesis that paranoia has a "positive side," in terms of accomplishments, although the cast of characters doesn't have THAT many redeeming qualities....
Was the book worth the price? Yes, clearly it gave me some information that was enlightening. I just wish the last 100 pages had held as much value as the first 40--as it is, those last pages have all the uselfulness of styrofoam packing peanuts.

The beginning of the book has some interesting concepts which are unfortunately underdeveloped in the book. The focus seems to be on highly paranoid individuals, their symptoms, and examples of them. The later part of the book merely rattles off stories of notable people without fully discussing the paranoid features. Additionally, the typos and writing style lead me to think that there was little care put forth in producing this book.

I bought this book for the purposes of finding out more about paranoia because some people close to me are sufferers. This book did not help me in my quest for more insightful information.

It's only a small book, which is good because the valuable part is even smaller. Firstly, I strongly agree with D. J. Moore and think Waterlily is pretty fair, so please read their reviews.
Paranoia in the sense of seriously dysfunctional behaviour based on delusional perception of being persecuted or attacked by others is common in the population and as the authors rightly state, expecting someone with a seriously paranoid personality to develop insight into their paranoia is characteristically unrealistic. Although paranoid people are presumably not happy, those on the receiving end of their behaviour often suffer far more. It is also clear that the spectrum of paranoid states extends beyond the obvious forms. e.g. bullying is now thought to have paranoia as an important underlying cause.
Amongst the problems with this book is a degree of extension of the concept of paranoia such that it covers behaviour well within the normal range and obnoxious behaviours whose origin in paranoia seem doubtful at best. For example, psychopathy is rolled up into the same spectrum. This leaves me unconvinced in the absence of clear evidence. Towards the end one is tempted to see paranoia everywhere. In fact to become a bit paranoid about paranoia.
The concept in the book of a continuum, with the extremely gullible at one end and the extremely paranoid at the other, has some usefulness, I think. The authors are right that paranoia can have advantages for the paranoid person and sometimes for others but that it also gives us Stalins and Hitlers. But I disagree with their idea that normal healthy suspiciousness is paranoia. The word, after all, comes from Greek and essentially means madness. The fact that we now know that the great bulk of paranoia is not frank psychosis but a personality trait or disorder should not be taken to the extreme favoured by the authors.
Sadly, the book represents yesteryear's psychiatry/psychology in that it is copious with anecdote and opinion and shockingly deficient in meaningful evidence. I dislike the use of 'paranoid' as a noun to refer to a person with a paranoid personality. Paranoid personality can be mild, moderate or severe and a paranoid person will have other personality dimensions: a binary classification does not do justice, however unjust a person with paranoia may be to others.
The excellent idea of writing about paranoia as a characteristic of famous and infamous people and in corporate life, politics, history and religion cries out for a much better analysis. This book is far from useless but should be taken with huge pinches of salt.

It is amazing, that nobody from medical community reviewed
this book! It is written with the only one goal in mind-Make some money! He tells short stories of some very famous peoples like Stalin, Hitler, Indira Gandhi Nero,John Hoover,etc.
He labeled them ALL PARANOIDS without seeing their med. histories- just because he believed it. The guy graduated from the 3-rd class college and works for the 3-rd class hospital.
I hope his student post the review in his class.
This is a joke, Freid would be turning in his grave to know
who is trying to to analisis nowdays!