Her mother tells her to 'bend over and take it like a woman' moments after the man's sadistic promise to beat her 'into fucking submission', to teach her obedience, hitting her while she begs from a corner of the room so all the camera can catch are her screams. ***Warning: this review is not for the fainthearted.***Ī video recently went viral of a Texas judge savagely beating his disabled teenage daughter with a belt. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges. Ronson not only solves the mystery of the hoax but also discovers, disturbingly, that sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he's sane and certainly not a psychopath.

And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues.

Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them.

The psychopath test about