Talking With Psychopaths and Savages

True crime

Print length: 320 pagesBlake Publishing, Limited, John, 2021

Description

Christopher Berry-Dee examines rampage, spree, and mass killers whose attacks devastate families and communities across the United States, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Organized around case studies of school massacres, workplace killings, hate crimes, and familicides, the book considers how different forms of public and private violence overlap. Firearms access and regulation form part of the inquiry, but the harder question is motive: grievance, perceived failure, inadequacy, and the desire for power recur without producing a simple explanatory pattern. The study approaches mass killing as both a true-crime subject and a problem of prevention, emphasizing the unsettling gap between identifying common pressures after an attack and reliably predicting who will become violent beforehand.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Journalistic

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Cerebral · Dark · Detached · Unsettling

Structure

Episodic

Focus

Ideas · Information

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Crime and punishmentKnowledge and truthMental healthPower

About Christopher Berry-Dee

Christopher Berry-Dee has built a British true-crime career around encounters with convicted murderers, chiefly through his Talking with Serial Killers and Talking with Psychopaths series. He formerly directed the Criminology Research Institute and served as editor-in-chief of The Criminologist. His books draw on prison conversations, letters, and audio recordings, placing offenders’ versions of themselves within his own interpretive frame. That access rests on a contentious tactic: Berry-Dee has acknowledged presenting himself to some prisoners as sympathetic to their innocence claims and prepared to examine a possible wrongful conviction. His interview-based approach also reaches beyond offenders, incorporating the views of psychiatrists and the experiences of partners who lived beside killers without recognizing them as such.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Blake Publishing, Limited, John
Language: English
ISBN: 9781789464221

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