WHY THEY KILL The Discoveries of a Rogue Criminologist

The normally pedantic Richard Rhodes presents a loosely disguised biography of Lonnie Athens, a fringe criminologist shunned by his peers, who spent 10 years interviewing violent humans in prisons. When a sociology journal editor read Athens's doctoral thesis, he claimed it was the worst article he had ever been sent to review, calling it a "mysterious analysis of stream of consciousness." The narrator's cheery drone of Athens's loosely defined terms (for example, "violentization," "frustrated malifaction," and "incipient violent self-image") breaks the cadence into petulant, guttural lingo as inmates recount their thoughts during a rape. The horrific tales stand as islands in a sea of words. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB/MAR 01]