The Anatomy of Motive: The FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals [Mass Market Paperback]

While fairly impressed by the author's approach (both in theory and in practice), to some of the most notorious crimes and criminals, I felt there were several things that need to be pointed out.

(1) Self-oriented. I would not terribly disagree if one said in this book, Mr. Douglas was too much ego-driven and self-glorifying. It seemed for all the cases covered, on the other end of the justice scale opposite to the criminals, there was only Mr. Douglas whose penetrating force in bringing them to justice, at least His theories of profiling were.

(2) Insufficient case files. Virtually all the cases covered in this book are outdated and hugely well known that publicized information of them means nothing much than a news report. To my recollection, the average age of these cases was somewhere between 15 to 20 years. In today's fast driven society with progressive crime diversifications, this is hardly enough for a starter's course.

(3) Basic. While retaining my tremendous respect to the author and his book, I felt the materials presented here were over simplified and sometimes far more insufficient than they should be. I acknowledge the argument that nothing sophisticated could be well expressed in just over 400 pages, but I did feel the limitation and insufficiency of the author as an interdisciplinary scholar a great number of times during the book.

(4) One View Street. Simply stated, the author did not elaborate any alternatives to his "profiling' in catching some of the most sophisticated criminals, despite the importance of these alternatives in both the theory and the field. I was even offended when Mr. Douglas devoted only one and a half pages to the JFK Assassination, determining, based on the "physical and forensic" evidence, that President Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald and Oswald alone. He declared him to be just another "paranoid loser" who happened to be able to murder the president, how convenient! Interestingly, the historical and political aspects, which were in fact the very foundation of this heinous crime, did not even come into subject! Despite of the fact that Mr. Douglas was still a very young man and certainly an outsider of the FBI at the time, he implied to blame, more or less scornfully, a paranoid public in believing a "conspiracy theory", to which the government bureaucracy could and would, in no way to hold up. In a landmark effort, the History Channel presented its most mesmerizing program to date, "The Men who Killed Kennedy" (DVDs available at Amazon). Virtually all aspects of that program, in a six-hour stride, contradict Mr. Douglas' one and a half pages' view on the event of the twentieth century America.

(5) Compromising - in detail. During the late chapters, when John Hinckley Jr. came into the subject, one inevitable spotlight was focused on Jodie Foster. While her early highly irresponsible and totally ignorant remarks of "encouragement" to Hinckley that without any doubt, partially prompted his attempt on the life of President Reagan, Mr. Douglas asserted her behavior to be ONLY "courteous". The reason, in a separate paragraph that ended the discussion (I did sense that earlier), Mr. Douglas told that he was pleased by the advice he offered to the actress during the filming of the "Silence of the Lambs", inconceivable, but true. Of course, one without a legendary record in crime fighting would have known, that Foster's attitude toward Hinckley was everything but "courteous" in a legal sense!

Overall, I would believe without the above drawbacks, the book could have been a better effort. However, I recommend this book to those interested in the subject and/or law enforcement officers, as a good starter on a never-ending journey into crime fighting.