W. W. Norton & Company
The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling
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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.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780393867695
EAN:
9780393867695
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
256
Authors:
Rachel Corbett
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Published Date: 2025-14-10
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The Monsters We Make is a quietly gripping examination of how we try to predict human behavior — and how dangerous it can be when we assume we understand it. What I loved most is how the book gently asks us to question what we think we “know” about crime, danger, and motive. It’s about the stories we tell to make sense of fear, and it really stays with you. For those of us who are captivated by True Crime, it's an absolutely essential read.
Loved this book
I finished this a couple days ago and I am STILL thinking about it. This is for all the true crime fans, but also psychology fans, history fans, criminology fans, and pretty much everything in between. I was riveted from the introduction onward and though I've always been a true crime enthusiast, this gives me a whole other depth of knowledge on HOW the criminal is made.
Review of several well-known cases and a couple of new-to-me cases. The links to criminal profiling were different in most of the stories, often just brief discussion of what I think of as "criminal profiling" - which is an FBI expert giving the age, race, marital status, living conditions, and habits of the perpetrator. Most people who read and watch true crime know that this has been largely discredited, but there are other aspects of criminal profiling (now called behavior analysis), such as analysis of word use in writing samples, that have actually helped solve crimes. I didn't get a lot of new information here, but it was a quick and interesting read.
If you want to understand anything about the history of how we think about "the criminal"--or just have an ace card to play when the subject of true crime or the latest Netflix serial killer fixation comes up--this book brings it all together in a smart and readable package. I've read the chapter on Henry Murray and the Unabomber already twice.Corbett's "You Must Change Your Life" is also great. Unexpected to go from the history of modern art to the history of crime--but they are connected because that book was about the origins of the concept of "empathy" and this book is about the origins of the idea of the "criminal mind," and both books really give you the story through characters that pull you through. Love the approach, love the style. Amazing author.
