Recommendations from our site
“Alienist was the term for a psychiatrist or a psychologist at the time. They were called alienists because mentally deranged people were thought to be alienated from themselves. This is a wonderful historical novel, written in 1994, about one such alienist in New York City, who helps solve a series of grizzly serial killings at the time when Theodore Roosevelt was the commissioner of police.” Read more...
The best books on The Pioneers of Criminology
Douglas Starr, Science Writer
Crime detection has become more and more sophisticated since the discovery of DNA, but how was it in the days when fingerprinting was a newfangled method and forensic psychology regarded with extreme suspicion? The Alienist, by historian-turned-novelist Caleb Carr, explores the early days of criminology. Set in New York at the turn of the 20th century (when Teddy Roosevelt was Police Commissioner), the novel is about the hunt for a serial killer and is so thrilling it’s even been turned into a Netflix series, The Alienist.
