BARBARA OAKLEY

   

    Explorations in mind and place

Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a codependent killer, or just give me a shot at loving you, Dear, and other reflections on helping that hurts.

Are some people predisposed to kindness to the point of being destructive to themselves and others? How much of our help is fulfilling our own needs—including those of our hidden passions?

This is the true story of Carole Alden, a brilliant, yet eccentric mother of five who evinced a deep and abiding need to help society’s outcasts. At her rural homestead an adopted pony mingled with llamas, goats, emus, and dozens of other creatures, familiar and exotic. But Carole’s expressed desire to help others extended beyond the animals she took in. It extended beyond her meager resources, even beyond the children she insisted she loved, yet sometimes left neglected in a surreal world of danger.

Finally, in the remote reaches of Utah’s Great Basin, Carole Alden shot and killed her husband. Dragging his heavy body from the house, she headed for a makeshift grave. Was the murder self-defense? Premeditated? Or was something else altogether at hand?

In this searing exploration of deadly codependency, Barbara Oakley—acclaimed author of the best-selling Evil Genes—takes the reader on a spellbinding voyage of discovery that examines the questions: Are some people naturally too caring? Is caring sometimes a mask for darker motives? Can science help us understand how our concerns for others can hurt everything we hold dear?

This gripping story brings extraordinary insight to our deepest questions. Is kindness always the right answer? Is kindness always what it seems?

Praise for Cold-Blooded Kindness

“Riveting and disturbing, an investigation into American-heartland pathos in which ‘guilt,’ ‘innocence,’ ‘victim,’ ‘perpetrator,’ come to seem almost hopelessly tangled. Barbara Oakley is to be commended for looking so hard and so closely at the motives, in some, that underlie acts of ‘kindness’ and ‘altruism’—suggesting that things are not always as they appear, and the phrase killed with kindness springs from the absolute bedrock of folk wisdom.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, professor of the arts at Princeton University; recipient of the National Book Award for her novel them; Pulitzer Prize nominee for the novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde

“Cold-Blooded Kindness is a terrific book. It combines old-fashioned narrative skills with new insights from science and a tough-minded view of good and evil that is neither sentimental nor cynical.”
—Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

“Cold-Blooded Kindness is a masterpiece. Our culture mistakenly teaches that all acts of kindness and altruism are good, but there are many overlooked victims out there who know that kindness can also control, manipulate, and harm. This book is their salvation.”
—Dr. Helen Smith, forensic psychologist and author of The Scarred Heart: Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill

“Truly a tour de force. Barbara Oakley couples the story-telling gifts of a born novelist with the insights of a sophisticated neuroscientist. Beginning with a sensational crime, Cold-Blooded Kindness gradually pulls back to reveal labyrinthine depths of duplicity conducted on a grand public scale. I alternated between shivering in horror and laughing out loud. This book is a murder mystery, a case study in social pathology, an artist’s biography, a courtroom drama, and a scientific detective story all at once. A lot is at stake: human decency; the integrity of the legal system; and the powers of science to illuminate human behavior in its strangest and darkest forms. Cold-Blooded Kindness is a triumphant achievement.”
—Joseph Carroll, Curators’ Professor of English, University of Missouri, St. Louis; author of Evolution and Literary Theory and Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature

“I was up all night—read it in one fell swoop. Oakley’s riveting narrative, lyrical prose, black humor, clarity of thought, and attention to detail put Cold-Blooded Kindness right alongside Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, but the insights from neuroscience put this in a class by itself.”
—Robert Burton, MD, neurologist and author of On Being Certain

‘A wonderful, intelligent and engaging study that illuminates the disturbing relationship between some of those who appeal to our better instincts, as victims, and those on whom they prey, including ourselves – it will grip the general reader and should be compulsory reading for anyone working in the “caring” professions. For many the world will never look the same after reading this book.’
—Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary

“Cold-Blooded Kindness is a masterful fusion of analytic depth and powerful narrative. A singularly incisive exposé of the fallacy of simplistic moral dichotomies we routinely deploy to judge (and misjudge) the intricacies of human nature. And a gripping read to boot.”
—Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology, NYU School of Medicine, and author of The New Executive Brain and The Wisdom Paradox

“Barbara Oakley sets her sights on a seemingly mundane act of domestic violence to reveal the many hidden layers beneath. To make sense of those layers, Oakley uniquely dissects the dynamic psychological, social, and cultural forces that led an artistically gifted and seemingly kind and caring woman to kill her husband. Was she an abused victim or conniving victimizer? Read Cold-Blooded Kindness and find out.”
—Mark Blumberg, F. Wendell Miller Professor of Psychology, University of Iowa, and author of Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us about Development and Evolution

“Barbara Oakley has written the most ambitious kind of true crime book, one that goes beyond a story well told and takes the lid off the simmering conditions and psychopathology that cook up into a tragic killing. There are haunting warnings for all of us in Cold-Blooded Kindness, as well as a fundamental truth: Homicide is self-will run riot—even if it wears a smiley face.”
—Lowell Cauffiel, New York Times best-selling author of House of Secrets

This brave and important book reminds us that even our best intentioned assumptions become prejudices if they go too long unexamined. Truth and justice deserve our rigorously honest attention and we must trust that they will protect us better, in the long run, than convenient lies. The book is also an excellent read—lively, suspenseful, strange, and as insightful as it is disturbing. You should read it.
—Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of The Happiness Myth and Doubt: A History