desertjarhead505 's review for:

Dark Dreams: A Legendary FBI Profiler Examines Homicide and the Criminal Mind by Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood

5.0

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Crisp, organized, and calmly analytical. I had the good fortune to attend a two-day workshop taught by Roy Hazelwood while working in a prison psychiatric hospital, and it was interesting to compare this book with his in-person presentation - this book reads like a much-expanded version of the notes from that training; he presented a lot of the same case histories and research results, but was less dispassionate in person. There aren't very many psychologists or psychiatrists whose contributions to forensic psychology have been as groundbreaking or as useful as those of the FBI's violent criminal profiling unit with their methodical and systematic collection and analysis of volumes of data about the people who commit these kinds of crimes. The books of this author, as well as those of John Douglas and Robert Ressler, are some of the best I could recommend as reading for anyone who wanted examples of how to do this kind of data collection and analysis, what is sometimes called the 'natural experiment', i.e. a study in which the researcher collects information from events with the aim of understanding them, rather than the type of experiment in which the researcher causes events to see what will happen.