(FORTUNE Magazine) – Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist by Richard Rhodes Knopf, 371 pages

Prisoners of Hate Aaron T. Beck, M.D. HarperCollins, 354 pages

Why did the killer cross the road? To get to the other side, stab you in the face, and carve a pentagram on your forehead. The answer may be obvious to you and me, but we're not sociologists or psychologists. For members of these unworldly tribes, the ready answer rarely comes readily. Study must be done. Only then can they reach the same conclusion we would. Cognitive therapist Aaron T. Beck, in Prisoners of Hate, and Richard Rhodes, who reports on criminologist Lonnie Athens in Why They Kill, both labor mightily in these flawed books to explain why people do violent things, yet their similar verdicts--those who smack were smacked themselves--are no shockers. Rhodes includes an epigram from W.H. Auden that highlights the foregone quality of his conclusion: "I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."

Tenure, however, is in the details: How much evil done, done how, and how many times. Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, wants to convince us that Lonnie Athens, a working-class Greek American, is the lone credible voice in a tweedy wilderness. Unlike the ivory-tower social scientists, Athens was the guy who went into prisons and listened to the truly bad. His gritty background (which includes his father's physical abuse), we're told, provided him with the street cred others lack: "I'd often ask the criminologists why they didn't study white-collar criminals.... What was their credibility?"

Athens came away from his jailhouse chats with a master narrative he calls "violentization," in which someone is first brutalized (by parents, peers, drill sergeants), becomes belligerent, and then embarks on "violent performances" (punching a teacher, committing a war atrocity). If this goes well, he becomes feared and respected, which permits him a shiny new self-image. Rapists and murderers, he argues, don't act out of blind compulsion, but instead make logical choices given their perception of the situation. Those perceptions may be paranoid or warped by extreme social exigencies (an inner-city kid who shoots somebody who "dissed" him by making prolonged eye contact), but the violent reaction is not an emotional explosion; it's a strategic strike.

In the dry style of a doctoral dissertation, Rhodes applies Athens' theories to a handful of sensational case studies, like those of the daughter of Lana Turner, Cheryl Crane, who stabbed her mother's lover; Alex Kelly, the preppy rapist; Mike Tyson; and Lee Harvey Oswald. He retells their tales while regularly stepping back to observe, "A year in Brownsville was enough to move Mike into the belligerency stage of violentization." Drawing strictly on secondary sources, Rhodes adds nothing fresh to these crime stories except this connect-the-theory exercise, which feels like filler in an already awkward book. In shifting between Athens' tumultuous personal life (Lonnie and his father brawl at a wedding; Lonnie finds romance after a divorce) and his supposedly maverick theories, Rhodes appears uncertain which is more compelling.

The cogitation behind what Athens calls the "decision" to be violent gets carefully picked over in Aaron Beck's Prisoners of Hate. Opening with an anecdote from a book tour, Beck recounts being confronted by a man, "Rob," "his eyes glaring," who badgers him in an increasingly hostile way ("I suppose you enjoy being the center of attention"). "He interpreted the recognition I received as having diminished him." Such extreme narcissism and paranoia, according to Beck, form the barbed wire of an egocentric prison. Rob was "mind reading"--that is, attributing derogatory thoughts to the shrink, believing he was the enemy. Defensive responses can be useful in a hostile world, Beck says. The trouble comes when the guy glaring at you through his windshield believes a parking space is a life-or-death matter.

Both accounts dismiss the notion of thrill violence, so common in books and movies. Even wife-beaters, Beck points out, don't do it because of psychosexual thrill, rage, or sheer cruelty; they believe that "hitting is the only way to shut her up." This portrait of the coolly reflective violent psyche seeking to avenge its hurts feels oddly retrograde; it mirrors the religiously derived moral universe that preceded Freud and social science, where evil deeds grow from a sinful nature. Oswald or Tyson are mere glosses on such ancient beliefs: Cain killed Abel not because of low self-esteem or bad schooling but because he had a jealous heart. Violence isn't always a mystery, these authors suggest; sometimes it's just a vigorous method of problem solving.

--Albert Mobilio