Promotional Information

The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist

About the Author

Richard Rhodes lives in rural Connecticut.

Reviews

"Irresistible. . . . You find yourself both surprised by some of its conclusions and mesmerized by its narrative." --The New York Times

"Unsettling, challenging, but never less than fascinating." --The Seattle Times

    
"Rhodes should be commended . . . not only for writing another wonderful book, but also for bringing to light the provocative scholarship of Lonnie Athens." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
  
"Certain to be controversial, Why They Kill is an engrossing book on a crucial issue." --The Kansas City Star

"Irresistible. . . . You find yourself both surprised by some of its conclusions and mesmerized by its narrative." --The New York Times

"Unsettling, challenging, but never less than fascinating." --The Seattle Times


"Rhodes should be commended . . . not only for writing another wonderful book, but also for bringing to light the provocative scholarship of Lonnie Athens." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Certain to be controversial, Why They Kill is an engrossing book on a crucial issue." --The Kansas City Star

What transforms an ordinary person into a violent criminal? Not genetic inheritance or low self-esteem or coming from a violent subculture, answers Pulitzer PrizeÄwinning author Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, etc.), but rather a process of brutalization by parents or peers that usually occurs in childhood. In this provocative study, Rhodes focuses on the work of criminologist Lonnie Athens, who teaches at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Athens believes that violent crime results from "social retardation," a process whereby an individual who was abused in childhood guides his or her actions by recourse to a "phantom community" of the internalized voices of caregivers and others. Rhodes tests Athens's theory against specific cases, including those of boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson; Cheryl Crane, daughter of actress Lana Turner, who at age 14 stabbed to death her mother's lover; and Lee Harvey Oswald. The author champions Athens as a pioneering genius battling a criminological establishment that ascribes violent crime to psychopathology or antecedent social conditions; yet he overestimates the originality of Athens's work (the "phantom community" in some ways resembles Freud's superego), and his well-intentioned study is at times belabored. Both Rhodes and Athens suffered through horrifically abusive childhoods, which adds a compelling personal note to this study but may also color their views. Rhodes strongly endorses Athens's call for school-based prevention programs to break the cycle of domestic and societal violence. Agents, Morton Janklow and Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.