The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

(Riverhead, $26)

“How do you convince someone who thinks you’re crazy that you’re not?” said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. In his latest venture into a world of shaky thinking, Jon Ronson, the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, “paddles around the swampy parts of sanity” trying to find out. Ronson interviews psychiatrists, scientists, and anti-psychiatry Scientologists. He also visits some textbook psychopaths as well as figures renowned for coldheartedness—from a former leader of a Haitian death squad to the layoff-happy ex-CEO known as “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap. What he discovers is that though it can be thrilling to recognize in people the telltale signs of an abnormal lack of empathy, the line between a healthy and an unhealthy mind is devilishly hard to define.

Ronson winds up making “a persuasive argument” that yardsticks such as the 20-item “Hare Psychopathy Checklist” can be dangerous weapons, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. But this “beguiling” book sometimes feels like merely a collection of quirkily chosen interview subjects. Ronson’s at his best when deftly illustrating that psychopaths might come in a variety of guises: He suspects that a lot of politicians and corporate executives might be more easily diagnosed with the personality disorder than “Tony,” a psychiatric hospital inmate who claims he feigned psychopathy to avoid a lengthy prison sentence but now can’t “unfake” it. But there’s no overarching thesis to tie this study together.

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“Conclusiveness is pretty much the opposite of Ronson’s brief” anyway, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. If The Psychopath Test shows anything, it’s that “the passionate intensity of complete conviction” can be dangerous. Ronson embodies the problem. Throughout the book, we watch him “pinging wildly back and forth between finding psychopaths everywhere and questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis itself.” What his example shows us is that “psychiatric diagnoses (and these days, the medications that follow)” are prone to faddishness. Maybe a touch of skepticism in these areas would “do us all some good.”