The Wisdom of Psychopaths


Book Description

Psychopath. The word conjurs up images of serial killers, rapists, suicide bombers, gangsters. But think again: you could probably benefit from being a little more psychopathic yourself. Psychologist Kevin Dutton has made a speciality of psychopathy, and is on first-name terms with many notorious killers. But unlike those incarcerated psychopaths, and all those depicted in movies and crime fiction, most are not violent, he explains. In fact, says Prof Dutton, they have a lot of good things going for them. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic and focused--qualities tailor-made for success in today's society. The Wisdom of Psychopaths is an intellectual rollercoaster ride that combines lightning-hot science with unprecedented access to secret monasteries, Special Forces training camps, and high-security hospitals. In it, you will meet serial killers, war heroes, financiers, movie stars and attorneys--and discover that beneath the hype and popular characterization, psychopaths have something to teach us. Like the knobs on a mixing deck, psychopathy is graded. And finding the right combination of psychopathic traits, sampled and mixed at carefully calibrated volumes, can put us ahead of the game.




Psychopaths and Love


Book Description

Psychopaths aren't capable of love. Find out what happens when they target someone who is, in this insightful and practical book by a woman who was a victim. When we're imagining falling in love none of us thinks that we might fall for a psychopath. We don't even know it's a possibility. Most victims say they believed they had met their soul mate. But as the psychopath gains power and control, what seemed like heaven becomes an ever-worsening emotional hell. Don't let it happen to you. If it already has, don't let it happen again. This book -- which contains the best material from the author's popular blog PsychopathsandLove.com -- will help you gain a clearer understanding of these harmful pathological relationships. Learn what a psychopath is and how to possibly spot one if you're being pursued. Find out what makes you vulnerable. Learn how to tell if you're being manipulated. Finally, get ideas about healing afterward and for preventing it from happening again -- or for the first time. "I wish I could have read this half year ago. Thanks a million." Liu "I cannot tell you how much this has helped me today. I cannot get anything done because I can't stop reading! My whole life has been a mess because of these men. My eyes are finally opened - maybe a bit late, but still opened." SuckerNoMore "Thank you for making me feel sane again." Tom "I wish I had read this years ago; it would have saved me money, heartbreak and pain. I met a one eight years ago and I believed I was with the man of my dreams. It's been a nightmare. I often wondered how I got caught up in this crap but reading about it has open my eyes." Michelle "I truly believe this info saved my life! I thank God I found it and I thank God you are eloquent enough to cut right thru to all the things I have been experiencing with this monster but was never able to verbalize! it felt like you were speaking directly to me! Thank you again for all the incredibly insightful info." Duped "I have no words but thank you so very much!" Anthony "After countless sessions with a therapist this makes more simplistic sense of what I had been going through in marriage. Very insightful and I wish the readers acknowledged. Wellness." Eric "I just want you to know what a valuable service you've provided by creating this site. I stumbled upon it the other day while doing some research on psychopathy in an attempt to understand how the individual I was involved with could do all the things he did. It was such a relief to realize, after reading several of your posts, that this monster who had me believing he was one in a million is actually just one OF a million... psychopaths. He's no more than a common, predictable set of symptoms and patterns. He fits the mold perfectly. I understand better than ever now that none of this was my fault; that he targeted me; and that the mental anguish he put me through was something I could not have resisted if I tried... because I could never be someone who thinks the way he does. Your information helped me realize that fully and take that last step of discarding any last little attempt to "reconcile" the unthinkable." L.B. "Thank you for a brilliant and concise definition of a psychopath. This information is the best I have seen on this topic...I now know I am not crazy. Thank you.




Young God


Book Description

Stripped down and stylized—the sharpest, boldest, brashest debut of the year Meet Nikki, the most determined young woman in the North Carolina hills. Determined not to let deadbeats and dropouts set her future. Determined to use whatever tools she can get her hands on to shape the world to her will. Determined to preserve her family's domination of the local drug trade. Nikki is thirteen years old. Opening with a deadly plunge from a high cliff into a tiny swimming hole, Young God refuses to slow down for a moment as it charts Nikki's battles against isolation and victimhood. Nikki may be young, but she's a fast learner, and soon—perhaps too soon, if in fact it's not too late—she knows exactly how to wield her powers over the people around her. The only thing slowing her down is the inheritance she's been promised but can't seem to find, buried somewhere deep in those hills and always just out of reach. With prose stripped down to its bare essence, brash and electrifying, brutal yet starkly beautiful, Katherine Faw Morris's Young God is a debut that demands your attention and won't be forgotten—just like Nikki, who will cut you if you let that attention waver.




Almost a Psychopath


Book Description

Do you know someone who is just a bit too manipulative and full of himself? Does someone you know charm the masses yet lack the ability to deeply connect with those around her? You might have an Almost Psychopath in your life. Grandiosity and exaggerated self-worth. Pathological lying. Manipulation. Lack of remorse. Shallowness. Exploitation for financial gain. These are the qualities of Almost Psychopaths. They are not the deranged criminals or serial killers that might be coined "psychopaths" in the movies or on TV. They are spouses, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and people in the news who exhibit many of the same behaviors as a full-blown psychopath, but with less intensity and consistency. In Almost a Psychopath, Ronald Schouten, MD, JD, and James Silver, JD, draw on scientific research and their own experiences to help you identify if you are an Almost Psychopath and, if so, guide you to interventions and resources to change your behavior. If you think you have encountered an Almost Psychopath, they offer practical tools to help you: recognize the behavior, attitudes, and characteristics of the Almost Psychopath; make sense of interactions you've had with Almost Psychopaths; devise strategies for dealing with them in the present; make informed decisions about your next steps; and learn ways to help an Almost Psychopath get better control of their behavior. The Almost Effect Series presents books written by Harvard Medical School faculty and other experts that offer guidance on common behavioral and physical problems falling in the spectrum between normal health and a full-blown medical condition. These are the first publications to help general readers recognize and address these problems.




Finding God in The Shack


Book Description

What would it be like to lose your youngest child to a serial killer? And then to have God invite you out for a conversation at the very shack where the terrible deed took place? And then imagine that the door to that shack of horrors opened . . . and before you knew it you had been swept up in the motherly embrace of a large African American woman? This most unlikely of stories, as told in William Young's The Shack, has become a runaway bestseller, and now a major motion picture, and it is easy to see why. But even as lives have been transformed through this book, other readers have sternly denounced it as a hodgepodge of serious theological error, even heresy. With one pastor urging his congregation to read it and another forbidding his congregation to, many Christians have simply been left confused. Aware both of the excitement and uncertainty generated by The Shack, theologian Randal Rauser takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the pages of the story. In successive chapters he explores many of the book's complex and controversial issues. Thus he explains why God the Father is revealed as an African American woman, he defends the book's theology of the Trinity against charges of heresy and he considers its provocative denial of a Trinitarian hierarchy. But at its heart The Shack is a response to evil and so Rauser spends the final three chapters considering the book's explanation for why God allows evil, how the atoning work of Christ offers new hope for a suffering world and ultimately how this hope extends to all of creation. Through these chapters Rauser offers an honest and illuminating discussion which opens up a new depth to the conversation while providing the reader with new opportunities for Finding God in The Shack.




Child of God


Book Description

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.




The God of the Left Hemisphere


Book Description

The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity. The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'. The book draws in particular on the work of Bolte Taylor, whose study in this area is having a profound impact on how we understand mental activity and processes.




Gameboard of the Gods


Book Description

The truth is, when you banish the gods from the world, they eventually come back—with a vengeance. In the near future, Justin March lives in exile from the Republic of United North America. After failing in his job as an investigator of religious groups and supernatural claims, Justin is surprised when he is sent back with a peculiar assignment—to solve a string of ritualistic murders steeped in seemingly unexplainable phenomena. Justin’s return comes with an even bigger shock: His new partner and bodyguard, Mae Koskinen, is a prætorian, one of the Republic’s technologically enhanced supersoldiers. Mae’s inexplicable beauty and aristocratic upbringing attract Justin’s curiosity and desire, but her true nature holds more danger than anyone realizes. As their investigation unfolds, Justin and Mae find themselves in the crosshairs of mysterious enemies. Powers greater than they can imagine have started to assemble in the shadows, preparing to reclaim a world that has renounced religion and where humans are merely gamepieces on their board.




Deadly Vows


Book Description

Marriage—it's all about love and understanding and being with each other for the rest of your days. For Elise, it means something entirely different. Thrown into a marriage on her father's orders, Elise isn't prepared to be married to the man known as Luca Pasquino. Luca is the next capo in line to take over his father's empire with an iron fist. He's cruel, he's evil, and he's ready to destroy anything and anyone that gets in the way of his plans for complete control. Elise has no idea what is in store for her. All she knows is that she can try to survive her life for the rest of her days with Luca. Update from author: I'm listening! In my zeal to tell my story, I relied on the expertise of others to ensure it went from my head to the printed page, which didn't go exactly as planned. Deadly Vows has now been re-edited to ensure the grammar and punctuation are now as they should be. Enjoy!




The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms


Book Description

After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.