Two Books That Will Change How You Think and Behave Forever

SO YOU'VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED

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I loved this book before I picked it up. The cover is brilliant in its quiet complexity and neon smears, and the title makes it sound like a self-help book for villains. And, delightfully, it kind of is. Only, Ronson isn't only trying to sell this to the bad guys wallowing in the mud. The book's message is also, if not, more so for everyone else. He's holding up a mirror to you, me, the millions of Twitter/Facebook users, and--at an arm's length away--himself. He is, after all, a self-proclaimed shamer. Though the title appears to address those who have fallen from grace (see Jonah Lehrer, Lindsay Stone, and Justine Sacco), what it might also say is, "So you've fallen in with the anonymous, millions-strong crowd of online commenters who make their jabs and carry on."

By interviewing those who have royally screwed up, and those who exposed and shamed them, Ronson reveals one of humanity's most wicked tendencies: frisson. But it's not just regular frisson, which is our desire to stare at a car-wreck on the side of the road. When it comes to shaming, and in the case of this book, publicly shaming,  we take this desire a step further. We're not only watching the car wreck; we're throwing stones at the people crawling out from beneath it.

Though Ronson isn't telling us to be more understanding and sympathetic, he is strongly suggesting it (and very convincingly at that). He doesn't come off as scolding, or reprimanding. He simply asks hard-to-ask questions and in so doing, takes away our privilege to remove ourselves from the public demise from a transgressor. He's not telling us to love transgressors or to stand between them and the stones. What he is telling us is that we can do whatever we want, but now, we can't do it without our own impunity. By sharing the stories of lives that have been ruined by public shaming, he leaves us with no choice but to dip our feet into their shoes.

In any case, there isn't a slow or benign moment in this book, and the last line is the best line--the hook-in-cheek phrase that drags our attention through our protective bubbles and toward the places we don't want to look, the margins where the results of our actions tend to rot.


THE PSYCHOPATH TEST

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Read this and you'll question the sanity of everyone you know--including the author's and your own. You won't be able to help it. Ronson gives us actual symptoms in psychopathy throughout his journey through the madness industry, each one relatively plain in description. As I read them, I had to wonder, "Do I do that? I think I do that! A lot actually!" I have to admit, this was kind of horrifying to read, and I would have stopped had it not also made me starvingly curious. At points, Ronson tips the scales with his subjects, not once allowing his readers to make any easy decisions about criminal minds and psychotherapy as a practice. I found myself wishing everyone else had read it so I could say, "This book, right?? Are you not losing your mind?" I dare anyone to read past the first few chapters and try not to diagnose at least five other people in their lives as psychotic, or at least semi-psychotic.

In lieu of causing us to suspect we and everyone around us might be a secret murderer, Ronson also does a good job in humanizing those who have actually been deemed psychotic. He takes away our lazy privilege of making up our mind about people and shrugging off their existence. Whether or not he intended it, he has pieced together a kind of narrative that reads like a house of mirrors: simple, yet beguiling in its many directions. The sides from which to see the people in this book are more numerous than you'd think. The close-up encounters with ruthless, violent and charming psychotics more than just dangerous--they're complex. They are the objects of an entire industry of medical and psychiatric research. It's a world that I've given little thought to, and one that I'm now very intrigued by.

On a personal level, Psychopath Test, has an introspective effect. Since it will no doubt cause you to worry that you yourself are psychotic, your attention will be brought inward, to a point of reflection. By seeing these extremes in psychological behavior, we have a backdrop we can compare our own behavior against. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that a book on the madness industry would cause its readers to consider the nuances of their own minds. Ronson deserves credit for the obvious things: excellent writing, brave journalism, and relieving self-deprecation, but his crowning achievement is instilling in his readers a curiosity they didn't know they had.