The Monsters We Make

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? In The Monsters We Make, prize-winning author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through six significant moments in its history. She delves into Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on the Jack the Ripper case, Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray’s pioneering profile of Adolf Hitler and his later experiments on his student Ted Kaczynski, and the FBI’s famed Behavioral Science Unit’s investigations of such killers as Ted Bundy. Taking the story into our own time and the use of “predictive policing,” Corbett examines how thin the line separating those who do harm and those who aim to stop it can be.

Author Biography

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.