Rachel Corbett - "The Monsters We Make" - Alex Kotlowitz
Rachel Corbett will discuss her new book The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling. She will be joined in conversation by Alex Kotlowitz. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Book: Criminal profiling—the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us—holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.
Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students—including the future Unabomber—by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted—to devastating effects.
With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.
About the Author: Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life, which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. She is a features writer at New York magazine, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Interlocutor: Alex Kotlowitz is the author of the national bestseller There Are No Children Here, which the New York Public Library selected as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. His second book, The Other Side of the River, was awarded the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction. For his documentary film, The Interrupters, he received an Emmy and a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. Kotlowitz’s work, which has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s This American Life, has been honored with two Peabody awards, two duPont-Columbia University awards, and a George Polk Award. He is a writer in residence at Northwestern University. Kotlowitz lives with his wife, Maria Woltjen, and their two children, Mattie and Lucas, just outside of Chicago.
Related Titles
Criminal profiling--the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological "fingerprints" of the monsters among us--holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger...