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Dr. Martha Stout's "The Sociopath Next Door" should be required reading for All of us! In these 218 pages, Dr. Stout delivers a startlingly vivid and utterly candid look at the astounding 4% of the U.S. population that falls into the category of Sociopath. She is quite right too when she cautions that most people are under the mistaken impression that Sociopaths are all violent criminals.

My first images upon contemplating the word "sociopath" were those of some of history's most infamous murderers and dictators.

"But most sociopaths are not mass murderers or serial killers..." Stout writes, "Instead, most are only life-sized, like the rest of us, and can remain unidentified for long periods of time." The ominous Truth is that a shocking average of 1 out of every 25 U.S. citizens is one of "the remorseless". While varied, as sociopaths they are each completely devoid of conscience and can do literally anything to achieve their personal goals, whatever they may be.

"The Sociopath Next Door" has shown me that, like other people with consciences, I have been making excuses for the various sociopaths that have crossed my life's path simply because... sociopathy is just That incomprehensible to us. "To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil...Sociopaths have no regard whatsoever for the social contract, but they do know how to use it to their advantage. And all in all, I am sure that if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him." Dr. Stout says.

"Why?!" We rail, searching for a logical reason when someone has hurt us in some way seemingly at random. He/She tries, is mean, has had a hard life, is misunderstood, is troubled, was abused in childhood, is selfish, vindictive, controlling, miserable, has low self-esteem, is power-hungry, and an endless variety of other rationalizations are conjured by those of us with conscience when speaking of the, more often than not, undetected sociopaths in our midst. In reality, we are trying to grasp a concept so foreign to our own being that it defies reason.

The teacher who publicly ridicules his students, the therapist who undermines the confidence of her patients, the cheating spouse who left you in debt, the cantankerous neighbor who seems to just lay in wait for the chance to cause trouble and the doctor who belittles

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