First, she wants to persuade mentally stable America of the imminent danger posed by its conscience-free citizens. 11, 2001, she tries - and fails - to accomplish three things. Wielding this statistic as if it were the latest headline (though a footnote cites studies dating from 1988 to 1997) and inspired, Stout tells us, by her reaction to the attacks of Sept. As Stout notes, again and again, sociopaths - whose defining characteristic is the utter lack of a conscience - might number as much as 4 percent of the population. The nasty old lady who kicked your cat? She's not just myopic or embittered, she's sociopathic! And so is the brutish supervisor at work, the guy who publicly quashes your best suggestions. Preying on the paranoid, her book is fodder for our worst - not to mention most implausible - suspicions. Sound too harsh? Could the reviewer possibly be an amoral and heartless sociopath herself? Stout might like you to suspect so. Instead, they're apt to feel a new awareness of the ludicrous nature of pop psychology. Despite the alarmist appeals of Martha Stout, a practicing psychologist and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, readers are unlikely to set down 'The Sociopath Next Door' with a new awareness of a previously unrealized threat. But just as most of us aren't having backyard barbecues with the trust-fund set, neither are we living down the street from dangerously ill people whose ruthless behavior constitutes a covert public menace.

In some cases, they may very well do both.

Judging by book titles, Americans either envy their neighbors ('The Millionaire Next Door') or fear them ('The Sociopath Next Door'). THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us.

Ruthless people book