But now, having read psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell’s thoughtful, compassionate and profoundly optimistic “Can Love Last?” I think my bad days may be behind me. Because Mitchell isn’t trying to sell me anything, yet what he says affirms the message of the throbbing strings. Love can last, he says, if you have the courage and the imagination for it.

Mitchell, who died in December 2000, announces at the outset that his book is about “romance and its degradation.” Romance he defines as “a particular sort of love in which there are erotic currents”; degradation, I think we’re all familiar with. Why, Mitchell asks, should romance so inevitably wane, to be replaced — and this is if you’re lucky — by something solid, steady … and slightly-to-excruciatingly dull? Popular explanations are thick on the ground: Romance depends on mystery, but long-term relationships depend on understanding. Romance gets its fizz from sexuality, but partnership demands tenderness and caring, not lust. Romance is based on idealization of the other, and idealizing anyone is asking for trouble. Freud described his yearning patients neatly: “Where they love, they have no desire; where they desire, they cannot love.”

The problem is real, and all the explanations are true, Mitchell says, but only partly, inadequately true. His own view, both warmed and deepened by a 30-year clinical practice of what came to be called “relational psychoanalysis,” is that romantic love doesn’t die a natural, inevitable death: We kill it, out of fear. It’s just too dangerous, he says, to experience erotic currents toward somebody you actually know, somebody who shares not only your bed but the chores and the cable bill. What if he or she stopped desiring you? Compared to the emotional risks of long-term domestic passion, Mitchell observes, the zipless fuck is as daring as oatmeal.

Drawing on case histories, as well as sources as disparate as Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Presley’s “All Shook Up,” Mitchell builds a quirky, original and ultimately convincing case. His is emphatically not a glib, accessible self-help book, which makes summarizing his argument hard; everything is connected to everything else. Still, the overall freshness of the thought is unmistakable.

Take his dissection of idealization, for example. Traditional analysis has “generally taken a dim view of the romantic, idealizing dimension of loving, understanding it as fundamentally regressive and defensive.” Not so, says Mitchell: Idealization is wonderful, as long as you choose your object wisely. Idealizing the beloved isn’t a recipe for heartbreak; the real killer is idealizing movie stars and mysterious strangers. OK, so you’re kidding yourself when you let yourself believe your partner is the funniest guy in the world. But you’re kidding yourself even more if you believe that there are guys out there who are both funnier and who don’t, say, screw up the crossword in ink, or insist on leaving for the airport three hours early. Both are illusions, but only the second one will lead you, inevitably, to lonely perusal of the personals in the New York Review of Books.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive of all Mitchell’s ideas is his take on the role of will in love. He agrees with the poets and songwriters that chemistry is real; you can’t make yourself love anyone. On the other hand, you can’t sustain love without making a conscious commitment to do it. Mitchell draws a lovely distinction here between deciding to do something — rationally weighing the pros and cons — and choosing one path or another in the face of some “fundamental ambiguity.”

Even though Mitchell is a philosopher, not a pop psychologist, he does eventually outline some strategies for identifying and neutralizing our impulse to murder love. For instance, recognize that the security and predictability so often seen as passion’s enemy are themselves illusions; anything can happen, anytime. (This sounds eerily prophetic, in the wake of The Events.) When you feel romance going stale, don’t engage in a “labored struggle to contrive novelty.” Instead, think about your ingrained patterns of loving. “Spontaneity is discovered not through action but through refraining from one’s habitual action and seeing what happens next.”

If you were having a bad day you could find fault with some details of “Can Love Last?” For instance, in his eagerness to make a point Mitchell sometimes sets up straw men and false dichotomies: He ascribes our own era’s fascination with spirituality, for instance, to the waning of confidence “that science itself will generate wisdom.” Somehow I doubt that astrologers and practitioners of hot yoga ever gave the contributions of science much thought. And he drags out Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and, later, Heisenberg’s tired old uncertainty principle to prop up the droopy observation that “what one discovers in another person depends a good deal on who one is.”

But in the end, it seems ungrateful to quibble with a thinker so humane and large-hearted. Romance, Mitchell concludes, is a “sandcastle for two,” a structure that requires constant rebuilding, an awareness of life’s fragility and the mindful interweaving of reality and fantasy. And though important jewelry isn’t actually necessary, what could it hurt?

Sometimes a person just wants to hand the reins over to somebody else. This longing accounts for the personal shopper, the prix fixe dinner and — judging by the towers of books on the floor by my desk — the proliferation of annual “Best of” anthologies. This year’s total is 15 and climbing.

The “Best of” anthology offers readers freedom from choice in the nicest possible way. The way it works is that each anthology has a long-term series editor, usually a writer of some repute, and an annual guest editor, generally a big-name literary figure. (For example, this year’s guest editor for Scribner’s “Best American Poetry” is Rita Dove; for Houghton Mifflin’s “Best American Short Stories,” it’s E.L. Doctorow.) The series editor does the grunt work, scanning the whole year’s output from big and little magazines, newspapers and even online magazines when the spirit moves. The series editor then turns over 100 or so of the best to the guest editor, who makes the final cut.

Houghton Mifflin is the 800-pound gorilla of the annual anthology biz: Its list of anthologies includes short stories, essays, sports writing, mystery stories, recipes, travel writing and science and nature writing, with more categories under discussion. Meanwhile, other publishers are getting on the anthology bandwagon. Scribner’s has been publishing its distinguished Best American Poetry series since 1988, and this year’s debuts include best magazine writing, science writing, food writing, art writing, writing by men and women of all colors and new (previously unpublished) voices.

Janet Silver, Houghton’s editor in chief, estimates there are more than half a million Houghton annual anthologies in print, and she describes the recent growth as “exponential.” (As if marking out its territory, Houghton has actually trademarked the phrase “Best American.”) Asked to explain the annual anthology’s newfound popularity, Silver says her own company owes its success to “readers with ever less time, looking more and more for preselection by authorities they trust and admire.”

Preselection: the wave of the future. You heard it here first.

Preselection is one of those organizing principles — like Oedipal conflict or right-wing conspiracy — that seem, the minute you hear them, to make disparate phenomena fall into an understandable pattern. Oprah’s Book Club, for instance, has had more influence on American literature than Lionel Trilling and Ralph Waldo Emerson combined. It’s so popular because Winfrey is saying, “This is a good book. Go and read it.”

What about those commercials on cable TV for anthologies of “the world’s greatest music” — the ones that always seem to include the New World Symphony, Beethoven’s Fifth and “Pathetique”? The audience may be full of people slumped potatolike on their sofas, but it’s obvious that they’re yearning for preselected classics.

And finally, consider these two words: Martha Stewart. Stewart is the queen of preselection; after her minions have scoured the planet for recipes, ingredients and domestic artifacts, she steps in and puts her personal imprimatur on this Christmas menu and that andiron. What is Stewart, if not the guest editor of the Best American Lifestyle?

Against this cultural backdrop, the rise of the “Best of” anthology starts to look like a historical inevitability. Yet annual “Best” anthologies are not exactly a new phenomenon. The first major series, dedicated to short stories, was launched in 1915; it seems to have had the field mostly to itself for more than half a century. In 1975, the annual Pushcart Prize anthology appeared on the scene, dedicated then, as now, to showcasing the best of the small presses. The next decade saw a few additions to the genre — most notably, the debut in 1988 of Scribner’s annual best poetry anthology — but the real groundswell didn’t begin until the early ’90s.

Since the real roots of the “Best of” phenomenon slightly predate choice overload, other forces probably account for its first stirrings. One possible candidate is the demise of the so-called canon. The canon, as every serious reader surely knows, was the corpus of academically sanctioned literature — Homer to Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway — that was routinely taught in high schools and colleges. But in the mid-’80s some academics began to argue that the very existence of the canon was a monument to intellectual imperialism: It was arbitrary, it was exclusionary, it had less to do with excellence than with tradition. These books endured not because they were great but because the impressionable young people who were made to study them then went on to teach them. According to critics, the canon needed to be opened up to other voices; they envisioned a better world in which we’d all be free to shape our own personalized canons.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Instead of opening readers’ eyes to the vast universe of possibilities, the demise of the canon left a lot of people less sure about what’s really worth reading. The “Best of” anthology, with its contents approved by a prestigious guest editor, assures readers that they’re not wasting their time.

Another element in the “Best of” groundswell is the clamor of unedited voices online, sucking up readers’ time and attention. The Internet seems to have heightened the determination of writers, skilled and unskilled, to make themselves heard in defiance of any filters. The idea seems to be that publishers, editors and academics are gatekeepers, censors and party poopers, determined to silence what they don’t like and to control what ordinary people are going to read. (This, you should know, is the exact opposite of the way editors, publishers and academics think of themselves — which is as people longing to discover hidden and original voices.)

Predictably, unedited literature online is a mixed bag. By all accounts, Stephen King’s online serial “The Plant” was a deft and readable satire, but after the first, successful installment so many readers failed to pay for downloads that King had to pull the plug. But much self-published Web writing seems to be merely old vanity-press content in new bottles. Amateur writers can now offer sample chapters on e-publishing Web sites, have their manuscripts printed one book at a time using print-on-demand technology and distribute real books through online bookstores. But quality is still the sticking point: Judging from the sample chapters I’ve seen, the books are the dreary equivalent of shows on community-access cable. They’re not anything that the average reader for pleasure would want to spend any time on.

For most of us, the anthology boom is a godsend. Anthologies let us encounter new writers and new ideas, and we can pursue them at book length if we choose. They’re the perfect bus or subway books, the perfect books for the summer house, the perfect bedtime reading. They work for any occasion when you can focus only for 20 minutes or half an hour. (And with a legitimate book on your nightstand instead of a ratty stack of magazines, you never again have to hear your spouse say, in tones of exaggerated patience, “Are you finished with this August 1998 New Yorker yet?”)

But even godsends have downsides, and I’m bound to say I’ve picked up a couple of disturbing signs in this bull anthology market. First, if this year’s crop of “Bests” is any indicator, publishers are slicing the available territory into thinner and thinner slivers. What if each succeeding series becomes overspecialized, like a mite that can only lay its eggs in the earwax of a Siberian tiger? Not only does specialization raise the specter of extinction, it defeats the purpose of an anthology. If you need to buy 10 different “Best of” anthologies to get a nice broad sample, you might just as well subscribe to lots of different magazines. That way, you at least get the pictures of Elizabeth Hurley with golden retriever puppies.

Then, too, will the growing number of voracious series editors begin fighting over the same choice morsels? Already, duplicate pieces have started turning up in different collections. A wonderful story by Jhumpa Lahiri appears in “Best Magazine Writing” and “Best American Short Stories,” and she shows up in “Best Food Writing” too (to slightly less advantage). Both “Best American Essays” and “Best American Science Writing” include physicist Steven Weinberg’s brilliant analysis of whether the universe shows evidence of design. (Answer, for those of you who haven’t been keeping up: It doesn’t.) Floyd Skloot’s first-person essay “Thinking With a Damaged Brain,” about life after contracting a debilitating virus, also appears in both anthologies.

And what do we know about the people preselecting our reading for us? Might we unwittingly be fostering growth of an anthology mafia? The signs are there. For instance, the durable David Halberstam has pieces in both “Best American Sports Writing 2000″ and “Best American Travel Writing,” and he edited the 1991 “Best Sports Writing” besides. Novelist Alan Lightman looks like a potential anthology don: He edited “Best American Essays 2000″ and is slated to edit an upcoming edition of Ecco’s “Best American Science Writing.” Not to mention Joyce Carol Oates, a veritable Veg-O-Matic of the anthology world: Oates was a founding editor of “The Pushcart Prize Anthology” in 1975, edited “Best American Short Stories” in 1979, edited “Best American Essays” in 1991 and edited “Best American Essays of the Century” in 2000.

What’s more, are these series editors going far enough afield to bag us the best? Although the introductions always allude to the onerous job of sifting through thousands of entries (and some even solicit contributions for upcoming editions, with mailing addresses and deadlines and everything), a jaundiced reader might be forgiven for thinking that if a bomb, God forbid, were dropped in midtown Manhattan, the next decade’s “Best” anthologies would be skinnier than an issue of Talk. All the usual suspects — the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, the New York Times — turn up so often that I began to wonder if editing a series merely means subscribing to the same magazines I do.

On the other hand, casting the net too wide presents its own problems. “Best New American Voices,” launched this year by Harcourt, has a sort of open-admissions policy; series editors John Kulka and Natalie Danford announce breathlessly that they’ve gone straight to the source and gleaned unpublished short stories from “writing programs, arts organizations, and community workshops.” This seems sweet but is surely destined for retail failure: Who, beyond the relatives of the anthologized, is the audience for such a book? True, the editors note that the work has been “prescreened” by workshop directors, and volume editor Tobias Wolff assures us that the stories are good, but I think the average anthology reader is looking for more filtration, not less.

Those who pride themselves on the catholicity or adventurousness of their reading tastes may well take a dim view of the “Best of” boom. I can envision intellectuals saying, with a certain hauteur, “I would never allow someone to choose what I read.” These are probably the same people who ask for menu substitutions in nice restaurants — on the theory that they know more than the chef about what tastes good with what — or who walk around looking like the wrath of God under the impression that they have a “personal style.” My position is, if it’s good enough for John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates or Harold Bloom, it’s good enough for me.

Literary lions who refuse on principle to play the “Best of” game are another problem altogether. For the 2000 volume of “Best American Poetry,” series editor David Lehman invited his 14 past and present guest editors to list their choices for 15 best poems of the century. Most did, but Adrienne Rich refused flat out, and Louise Glück wrote a thoughtful letter, also declining. It said, in part: “There can’t be, I think, the best of the great … What remains is preference.”

To which I can only respond, on behalf of the hungry readers of the world: Louise, Adrienne, listen to me. You have no idea what it’s like out here, trying to sort through the noise, the hype, the mediocrity, in search of something that’s really worth paying attention to. Your preferences are fine. Just give us the list.

But recent publication history notwithstanding, sometimes a writer should just say no. A case in point is “The Island of Lost Maps,” a swollen version of a 1997 article from Outside magazine. In it, first-time author Miles Harvey tries to assemble a book from materials that made a fine magazine piece but can’t go the 350-page distance. And while anyone can sympathize with his plight — who, after all, hasn’t tried to crank out an overdue term paper on a carelessly chosen topic? — the results are not much fun to read.

“The Island of Lost Maps” is the story of a mousy and unremarkable petty crook named Gilbert Bland, who had a brief career in the ’90s as a map thief. Posing as a researcher, Bland would gain entry to rare-book collections and slice old maps out of antique atlases with a single-edged razor. These he would fold up, hide in his clothing and eventually sell to unsuspecting — or at least unquestioning — dealers. Before being busted at the Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he had stolen more than half a million dollars’ worth of maps, many of which are still unclaimed. All this material is covered in the original article. Unfortunately, Harvey chose to structure “The Island of Lost Maps” around the search for the motives and history of the “real” Bland, who proves to be elusive, uncooperative and as colorless as his name.

There were warning signals that this might be a bad idea, though Harvey ignores them. Bland’s acquaintances, whom Harvey dutifully tracks down, either don’t remember the guy or describe him with words like “pleasant,” “nice enough,” “just your average Joe.” And what evidence he does uncover suggests Bland was driven by neither the passion nor the thrill of the chase; instead, he saw old maps as equivalent to car radios: easy to steal, easier to sell.

Nevertheless, Harvey labors to convince us that Bland really is worth a book. Perhaps he was “less of a con man than an un man” he suggests, hopefully, “inducing unmindfulness, lulling people into believing he was simply not worth much thought one way or another.” Elsewhere he muses, way too creatively, “Maybe you steal maps because you’re searching for a home … or crave the dark joy of appropriation.” Harvey is not the first journalist to pick the wrong subject; even the peerless Janet Malcolm was felled by a dull protagonist in “The Crime of Sheila McGough.” Still, the strain is unpleasant.

To further distract us from Bland’s blandness, Harvey tries to inflate incidents and descriptions out of all proportion to their importance, and to pad the text by recapping map-related books and movies. (Does anyone here not know the plot of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”?) He feels bound to spin chapters out of nothing and to describe minutiae with a detail that would choke Proust. Of a statue outside the Peabody Library, where Bland was arrested, he writes: “The general’s steed, a study in power and movement with muscles taut, mouth chomping at the bit, neck twisting against the reins, tail flying, seemed to making a mockery of the sluggish chase below.”

On coming across a town called Eldorado he claims kinship with “so many dreamers, desperadoes, and idiots before me: Raleigh, whose search for the golden city cost him his son and then his own head; Gonzalez Pizarro, whose men were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and saddle leather before abandoning their journey”; and on through the cardboard box marked “Explorers — history.”

Perhaps Harvey’s most dangerous move is trying to plump up his thin subject by turning himself and his pursuit of Bland into a leitmotif. He invites us into his study to read what’s tacked on the wall behind his computer, into the coffee shop where he first read about Bland in the paper (“Where my life was transformed one day and this book was born”) and even into his mind: “I cannot say whether in seeking [Bland] out I was somehow looking for the grandfather I never met.” Don’t know about you, but I don’t need a map to identify deep doo-doo.

In fairness, there is interesting stuff in “Island”: a section on map engraving in the 17th century, for instance; another on modern mapmaking at the American Map Corp. in Queens, N.Y. But as I read them, I couldn’t help thinking, “Gee, he could get some great magazine pieces out of this.”

In other words, I’d find some small thing to quibble about to render the subsequent praise less fulsome and more believable. I’d also take great care to be specific: As Stengel cautions, generalized flattery rarely wins points. The reference to Greek scholar Burkert is — and I hope I don’t flatter myself — an inspired touch; it implies I’m such an expert on the topic that praise from me is hard-won. Then I’d lay the kudos on with a trowel.

Unfortunately, dear reader, my responsibility is to you, not to Richard Stengel or to my career and the possible advantage that currying favor with a Time editor and New Yorker contributor might bring. Thus, I am bound to say that while sections of “Youre Too Kind” have considerable charm, the best thing about the book is the title. (Which, as anyone can see, is fabulous.) Hung on an interesting but slender premise — possibly hatched over dinner with friends — it has been expanded to a length that neither the idea nor the writer’s enthusiasm for it can sustain. “Youre Too Kind” is really a series of essays, some of which read like dutifully researched term papers and some of which would have made terrific magazine articles. A genuine history, it’s not.

Stengel casts his net far too widely, finding the origins of flattery in the stroking and grooming of chimpanzees, which he sees as a proxy for the behavior of our earliest ancestors, and going right up to the latest Sharon Stone interview. (Breathless journalist: “How do you see yourself in 10 years?” Stone, who knows how to play the flattery game: “More like you, I guess.” Turns out the bombshell is an aspiring writer.) How can you say anything interesting, or even true, for that matter, when you have so much territory to cover? He’s forced into inane observations such as “We get the word ‘politics’ from the Greek word for city, polis.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but  duh.

When he plants his feet in the 20th century, though, Stengel is on firmer — and more interesting — ground. He fingers self-help guru Dale Carnegie as “both a cause and a symptom of the shift away from the significance of ‘character’ in the American makeup to the importance of ‘personality.’” Carnegie’s epiphany was that “the average man is more interested in his own name than in all the other names on earth put together”; ergo, the best way to win friends and influence people was to behave like a bipedal Labrador retriever. Slightly later we have Norman Vincent Peale, who believes that the way to be happy is to think happy thoughts: Pick appearance over reality every time. Flattering the millions of Peale or Carnegie devotees would be child’s play.

And this is the route modern politicians have chosen; all presidents and presidential candidates now profess to trust in the wisdom of the American people. How smart do you think most of our compatriots really are? The Greeks had a word for this political ploy, Stengel says: demagoguery, or flattering of the demos.

In our own era, Stengel argues, flattery has poisoned the very wells of democracy: our information sources. Despite all the tsk-tsking you hear about the adversarial relationship between the media and public figures, the bond is really one of flatterer and flatteree. As a Time magazine senior editor, Stengel evidently knows whereof he speaks when he describes “Washington journalists in their ill-fitting suits and bad shoes” ingratiating themselves with elected officials and competing over “scraps of gossip that pass as news.”

For all my reservations about the unevenness of Stengel’s coverage, I can say that as a handbook on how to flatter, “Youre Too Kind” rules. For instance, he advises us never to say to someone, “You got your hair cut!” Either say, “That haircut looks great on you,” or say nothing at all. People are always nervous about their haircuts. If you want to compliment a writer (which not nearly enough people do, in my experience), don’t ever say, “Hey — I saw your article!” without adding that you liked it. The writer will be too proud to ask what you thought, will brood for months, and will start avoiding you in the street.

When someone asks you to be candid, don’t. Nobody really wants candor; what they want is reassurance, and if you’re a good friend you’ll give it. Our enemies supply all the candor we need.

And to my mind, the wisest counsel Stengel offers the aspiring flatterer — men seeking to flatter women of a certain age, take note — is to mix a little bitter with the sweet. Just telling someone she looks “great” not only lacks originality; it suggests you’re not really paying attention. I speak from experience: The nicest thing my husband has ever said to me in a long and happy marriage was when he shot me an admiring glance in the elevator on our way out to dinner and said, “You know, you look sort of like a Scandinavian movie star on the wrong side of her career.”

What could I do? I melted, and murmured, “Sweetheart, you’re too kind.”

However, Rhodes’ late-Victorian level of productivity has a downside, which brings me to “Why They Kill.” In this ambitious but unsatisfactory amalgam of biography, sociological theory, psychohistory and social criticism, Rhodes lays out a staggering agenda: He promises to reveal “a fundamental breakthrough in human psychology” that will explain essentially all acts of violence. But you may find, as I did, that the breakthrough is less revolutionary than advertised, that Rhodes leaves fundamental questions unanswered and that “Why They Kill” is a book sorely in need of more gestation.

“I have personal experience of violence,” Rhodes notes in the prologue. Between the ages of 10 and 12, he tells us (as he has in many previous books), he and his brother were beaten and otherwise abused by their stepmother while their father stood passively by; this “extended personal encounter with evil” has given him a lifelong fascination with “what causes such violence and how it might be prevented.”

Rhodes shares his fascination with Lonnie Athens, the criminologist whose life and work form the basis for “Why They Kill.” Athens, too, had an abusive parent — in his case, a father who beat him, pushed his head into the toilet and once pulled a gun on him. And Athens chose his career, as Rhodes chooses his subjects, in order to make sense of his own childhood violence. When Athens took his first criminology course, he tells Rhodes, “I thought, Wow, I know something about this … I’ve got something to contribute here!”

His contribution took shape as an idea for a research project. Instead of merely theorizing about the factors that turn people into criminals — as Rhodes says all other criminologists were doing — Athens decided to go to the source: to wheedle his way into prisons and ask violent felons why they’d killed, or raped, or maimed.

What he found makes singularly depressing reading. As the extended transcripts included here reveal, violent felons are inarticulate, numbingly profane and chillingly offhand about their crimes; their motives are all variants on “He dissed me so I shot him,” “He pissed me off so I shot him” and “She wouldn’t stop screaming so I killed her.” Life is cheap, and evil is banal.

But how did these criminals get that way? Athens’ conclusion, based on hundreds of interviews and boiled down to its essence by Rhodes, is this: “Not poverty or genetic inheritance or psychopathology but violentization” — i.e. violent socialization — “is the cause of criminal violence.” Violentization, as laid out in Athens’ elaborate taxonomy, is a four-step developmental process beginning with “brutalization” by family or peers, a process that can include, but isn’t limited to, physical abuse. (Simply seeing a mother or sibling routinely abused is enough.)

Brutalization can lead to the second step, an attitude of “belligerence,” and the child may then respond to provocation by turning from brutalized to brutalizer with the third step, a “violent performance.” If this initial act of violence succeeds, it may lead the child to a the ultimate state that Athens calls “virulence,” a determination “to attack people physically with the serious intention of gravely harming or even killing them for the slightest or no provocation whatsoever.” There is slightly more to Athens’ theory — each category has subheads and sub-subheads — but this is the nut.

Athens’ peers, we learn, have responded to these insights with either indifference or scorn — attitudes that Rhodes attributes to Athens’ thinking outside the academic box. For one thing, he’s using case histories instead of huge surveys. Yet, disturbingly, the academics who disagree with Athens — who turn down the papers he submits to journals and apparently savage his books in reviews — are dismissed without being named or cited. We have to take Rhodes’ word for their bias.

In fact, though, Athens’ theory seems to be just common knowledge expressed in jargon — a variant on “What goes around comes around” — rather than the touted breakthrough. And it begs a central question: What made the murderer’s grandparents “brutalize” their child? Or the great-grandparents brutalize their children? Surely poverty and psychopathology play a role here, though Rhodes specifically denies it.

Athens’ etiology of violence, even if it doesn’t deal in first causes, has profound implications. He thinks, for instance, that we should stop the hand-wringing over TV, because a child’s “violence coach” can only be someone of emotional significance, generally a parent. On a bleaker note, if Athens is right when he says that violentization, once completed, can’t be undone, then we really do need more maximum-security prisons. Yet in the end, I couldn’t help thinking that all Rhodes’ and Athens’ hundreds of pages of labored text were distilled, poignantly and elegantly, in the 19-word epigraph to the book that Rhodes took from W.H. Auden:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.