In the wake of all sorts of stupid notions about what a eugenics should be, this kind of book -- which focuses much more on the foundations of character itself, rather than much more shallow and ostentatious notions of intelligence and physical beauty -- is sorely needed. To make that better world we all dream of, in this brave new era of things like gene therapy, we should be focusing first and foremost on the genes which dictate good character.

Also, I am glad to finally see a book which takes a completely different approach to the topic of evil than the usual sociopath-psychopath approach, and which focuses on the tempestuous nature of borderline personality disorder instead. I must confess that I wasn't comfortable with the idea that "merely moody" people could indeed be supremely dangerous, but as I read on in Oakley's book, I definitely started appreciating her logic on the matter.

With that said, I offer three somewhat sizeable grains of salt while reading this book:

1) Borderline Personality Disorder, like all psychiatric disorders, is a diagnosis all too easily and hastily given to people who are simply trauma and abandonment survivors. So to demonize such people, which happens all too often, is not at all fair or just. While you read Oakley's book, please keep in mind the evils of adding insult to injury when talking about people who deserve the precise opposite of stigmatization and demonization in the face of their traumatic abandonments and betrayals.

2) Speaking of BPD, and even of Oakley's story of her own sister who was more or less abandoned for extremely long periods of time in hospitals due to her polio as a very young child, why doesn't Oakley look more into the early abandonment and neglect factor as a possible early cause of adult BPD? There continues to be, after all, in the DSM manuals, "Reactive Attachment" and "Disinhibited Social Engagement" disorder diagnoses that stem from primarily early childhood neglect and abandonment conditions. So why doesn't Oakley look into this possibility more, even if genetic susceptibility does play a factor? There seems to be something of a grudge going on here, even if the grudge is understandable.

3) All throughout the book, you are reminded of Pink Floyd's famous song "Us and Them" as Oakley all too often uses her expertise to deride and mock anything that isn't seemingly on the winning side of history. She is way too quick to only point fingers at those people and notions that lie outside the all-American establishment and the status quo, such as the "singular" close-mindedness of Soviet sailors with nothing ever bad to say about their own government or "sociopaths" like Peter Duesberg, because those are safe non-establishment targets. But only when a seeming rogue becomes endorsed by the mainstream, like the Australian discoverer of the ulcer-causing bacterium H. pylori, do "sociopath crackpots" now magically become okay to stop mocking.

This is a very good book with some telling immaturity and painfully biased partiality. That said, it still very much bears reading.

This book has so much promise but is marred by a preoccupation about the exact psychological and DSM terminology for the various versions of psychopathy. The science and social science research is important, but dominate the book to an unfortunate extent. I found myself skipping page after page of detailed parsing of borderline versus antisocial disorder. Maybe the author will come out with a revised edition that is better organized or edited for the general reader. For the general reader, The Sociopath Next Door is a good option.

This applies to the Kindle edition only. I assume the issues are not present with the dead tree version of the volume.

I find Oakley's subject matter fascinating and her writing style, particularly when relating personal anecdotes, is beautiful. Unfortunately, the conversion to Kindle eBook seems to have missed a few steps. A few missing letters was frustrating at first, now on chapter 6 I find it so distracting as to make me consider giving up. A quick run through some sort of spell check would have gone a long way. Though it wouldn't have caught "often how a variety of symptoms", it would surely have spared us "have a e ndency" and this lovely passage "This cross section d monstrates some of the br in's internal structures. The amygdala and hippocampus are actually locate deep within the brain ut are shown as an overla in the approximate areas that they are locate ."

I continue trudging through, but it would surely be more enjoyable if some effort had been put into the product. If you intend to read this book, you may want to consider getting the actual *book*

Barbara Oakley's "Evil Genes" is a bold new approach to understanding the human psyche. While we are just now approaching the threshold of truly understanding the manner in which our brain operates, Dr. Oakley, employing a writing style that allows the reader to see matters with her personal (sometimes painful) experiences, has written an important introductory work chronicling what we know about the functioning of the brain to this point in time.
With the advent of fMRIs, the brain is being literally opened up to the world and Oakley does a credible job in providing the lay readership with recent research. Most troubling for us, however, is the potential that psychopathic/sociopathic behavior might actually be a function of cranial predisposition, allowing such individuals to legitimately claim, "I can control my actions!" Along the way, the book examines all the great human monsters of our time--from Hitler and Stalin through Slobodan Milosevic et al. This book is definitely a worthy read.