** 1/2 - This could have been a really fascinating book, but I found it extemely disjointed and the author's personality very abrasive. I felt like he was hostile to anyone whose views didn't correspond to his on a number of issues (the death penalty, Christianity). When I tried to re-read the book recently, I just couldn't take it at all. It became a Could Not Finish even before I came to the parts that I found so objectionable in the first reading. In Mind Hunter, FBI profiler John Douglas describes his career in behavioral science chasing down some of the most brutal and most notorious serial killers of the past several decades.
Perhaps the weakest part of the book is its organization. He jumps around in time from case to case - sometimes in the middle of describing cases, and he references things that he hasn't yet described - or he says the same things over and over. Also he spends quite a bit of time on his childhood dream of being a veterinarian and his time in the Air Force working in education - both of which struck me as self-indulgent. He attempted to link them to his profiling career but the result is pretty strained and uninteresting.
Where Douglas does explain his profiles and the reasoning behind certain elements of them, he truly is fascinating - in those moments, it is easy to see why he claims to have served as the model for the profiler in Silence of the Lambs. Unfortunately these moments aren't nearly as prevalent as I had hoped or expected. Generally, Douglas provides us with a brief, horrifying glimpse into the crimes and crime scenes, the personality of victims (at least on occasion), a pronouncement of his profile, and then he goes on to say how spot-on it was. A significant weakness of the book is that Douglas never even once mentions an instant when he was wrong in any material way. I find the implication that in 25 years of work he never made any grave mistakes despite the huge amounts of stress utterly implausible - and the book loses a great deal of intellectual honesty because of this omission.
Douglas also uses the book as a soapbox to proclaim his views on the death penalty, the ineptitude of therapists and his views on legal culpability. Mentioning his views once or twice I wouldn't have minded, but he harps on them, and he manages to convey outright hostility to anyone who disagrees with him. I was enjoying the book fairly well, but it is too long and too repetitive. And then the author ruined things for me by ending the book on a note of moral judgment of society. And the last thing I want from my reading is self-righteousness.
Post-script: After reading Robert Ressler's book Whoever Fights Monsters, it seems that Douglas may have exaggerated his accomplishments. Obviously it comes down to a credibility issue, but both men claim credit for a number of the same breakthroughs and the same profiles and while they reference one another as having been present, neither talks much about the other - at least not directly. On the whole Mind Hunter is the more dramatic tale and evokes greater suspense, but his ego rubbed me the wrong way. And at times he seemed to have a disquieting admiration for the murderers - such as when he professes a certain degree of fondness for brutal killer Ed Kemper - that I found pretty unnerving.
