The gift of fear : survival signals that protect us from violence /

De Becker, a national expert on the prediction and management of violence, thinks most people are great victims because they ignore their fears and survival signals. His frighteningly simple advice will come as no surprise to women: use your intuition. De Becker believes every crime has a warning and a motive and that the code of predictable violence can be broken by trusting the phenomenon that he defines as "knowing without knowing why." If people believe in and are alert to the possibility of danger, they can reduce their risks and save themselves. Written with consummate style, the book recounts the motives, warning signals, and defenses against wife beaters, stalkers, assassins, enraged employees, and violent children. De Becker's experience as a presidential adviser, consultant, expert witness, trainer, and designer of a system that evaluates threats to Supreme Court justices should convince readers to trust the involuntary certainty of fear over the voluntary uncertainty of anxiety when confronted by those to whom senseless acts make perfect sense. --Patricia Hassler

"Remember that the vast majority of violent people started as you did, felt what you felt, wanted what you wanted," admonishes the author. "The difference is in the lessons they learned." De Becker, founder of his self-named company that designed a system used to screen threats aimed at public figures, grew up in a volatile household in which, at one time, he witnessed his mother, a victim of repeated beatings, shoot at and nearly kill her husband. Here he writes how he learned to sense and move away from dangerous situations. According to him, it is possible to develop survival skills based on intuition that can protect us from people unable to control their violent instincts. De Becker argues that the tendency of TV news programs to air stories of unusual disasters as immediate dangers interferes with our ability to discriminate between real and manufactured fear. A practical if pedestrian guide to enhancing the safety of yourself and your loved ones. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The CEO of a security firm on how to keep safe in these troubled times. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

``The energy of violence,'' de Becker asserts, ``moves through our culture,'' and ``nobody is untouched.'' A high-profile consultant on the ``prediction and management of violence,'' de Becker offers a sometimes startling mixture of autobiography, anecdote, and detailed, even scholarly, examinations of the various qualities that contribute to violent situations, as well as the escalating stages that violent confrontations (between an abusive spouse and his mate, a criminal and his prey, a stalker and his target) follow. His basic argument here--that all of us really do know when we are in the presence of danger, though we frequently deny it, ignoring the telltale signs of a serious threat--is persuasive, and there's much in his specifics about violent behavior and how to read it that's likely to prove useful to readers, but the overlong and somewhat overly detailed text (it's uncertain at times whether this book is intended for individuals, law enforcement agents, or scholars) sometimes obscures those points.