I would like to thank, first and foremost, all of the wonderful people I interviewed for this book who shared their personal experiences and insights. One of the most rewarding aspects of writing a book is the opportunity to meet such a wide range of remarkable people. In every interview I was struck by the openness and intense interest of people in generously contributing their personal stories. I feel this book is very much a collective effort to explore and understand sudden rage and aggression, which in one form or another touches us all.
Creating a book is the mountaineering of writing. It is all-consuming—impossible without the support of friends and family. No one does it alone. This book was forged and polished by close collaboration with my gifted literary agents Jeff Kellogg and Andrew Stuart. Their insightful criticisms and creative contributions to this work were absolutely essential. My editor at Dutton, Stephen Morrow, was a delight to work with, and it is a privilege to have had his expert guidance and creative collaboration. As every rock climber knows, any achievement on the sharp end of the rope is made possible only by knowing that there is a steady and skillful hand on the belay. I thank my copyeditor, Rachelle Mandik, for her diligent work to make my text as clear, correct, and presentable as possible. I am grateful to my friends, notably Dan Coyle, Tom Cecil, John Gregory, Drake Olsen, Manzar Ashtari, and Pamela Hines, and especially every member of my family for reading snippets of text as it emerged. I am grateful to the Helen R. Whiteley Center at the University of Washington at Friday Harbor Laboratories for the precious opportunity for concentrated research and writing in the summers of 2013 and 2014. Those days of refuge, looking out the window of the writer’s studio at sailboats rocking in San Juan Harbor, of uninterrupted study and writing punctuated by picnic lunches with Melanie on a sunny bluff overlooking the ocean, and evenings of scholarship with writers, artists, musicians, scientists, and students, will never leave me.
It is often difficult to trace back to the moment of inspiration that sparked a new idea, but in the case of this book, that moment is crystal clear. One evening I related my experience with pickpockets in Barcelona to friends in a congested noisy cocktail reception at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in New Haven, Connecticut. John Rennie, science writer and former editor of Scientific American, exclaimed above the din, “That’s your next book!” Brainstorming from that moment, I scribbled in my notebook the entire train ride home notes that became the outline for this book. Remarkably, that creative burst of energy produced the complete structure and scope of this book, which is essentially unchanged from those notes. Such fleeting chance events are one of life’s great delights. They become plot points in one’s personal life story. Had I shared a beer that night with someone else in that crowded room, this book might never have happened. But when you are blessed with so many extraordinary people sharing their lives with you—close family, good friends, talented scientists, writers, and editors—such moments have little to do with chance.