Despite being a book that explores every inch of McVeigh's life that Painting could get her hands on, it does not absolve him for his crimes. Writing long before the emergence of the World Wide Web, the authors attributed America's ID epidemic to the unique stresses of modern life, especially information overload, as well as other isolated or ongoing traumatic experiences that, in combination, "lead to the physical breakdown of a person's entire ability to make sense of his experience," making them more suggestible to outside influences and rendering them "prone to uncontrollable urges and sudden outbursts of violence.

These individuals included, among others, former FBI agent GuyBannister, CIA asset David Ferrie and local businessman Clay Shaw. This book ties so many cultural threads of the 1990s together and weaves them through the stories of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. There is something powerful about that, about the willingness to dedicate so much time and energy to a pursuit that may never yield a true conclusion. While there, he, along with several other undergraduate students, became a subject for psychological tests conducted by a former interrogator for the WWII intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – Henry Murray.

Students wrote essays about themselves, were taken into a room and placed in a seat facing bright lights and a two-way mirror, hooked up to electrodes and then berated, belittled and subjected to brutal verbal attacks directed at their egos and beliefs.

During his trial, his defense attorneys argued that Bremer was schizophrenic, legally insane and had "no emotional capacity to understand anything;" but prosecutors argued otherwise and said that, while perhaps the man was disturbed, he knew what he was doing when he attempted to kill Wallace and had done so to get attention, even calculating his arrest and subsequent media coverage of his trial. After graduating high school, he enrolled in college, where he was remembered as a "strange, aloof and argumentative" fellow who "rarely talked to anybody. In their 1977 book, Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change , Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman proclaimed that a rapidly growing "epidemic of sudden personality change" existed in America, a cultural phenomenon they dubbed "snapping," wherein normal individuals undergo startling personal transformations that sometimes lead them to engage in acts of random violence.

Included among this growing family of Lone Nuts was twenty-two year old Arthur Bremer whose attempt to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace with a . To her credit, Painting doesn’t really go down the tinfoil hat rabbit hole and explores (mostly) more plausible ways in which the official OKC narrative doesn’t fit the facts. I'd always heard that this case was a white supremacist who acted alone, this book shows it was far complicated than that.

Rampage" – (verb): a course of violent, riotous, or reckless action or behavior; (noun): violent behavior that is reckless, uncontrolled, or destructive.This book went way beyond reasonable expectation and the section on mind control was a special treat and proved to be one of the better parts of the book for anyone who has done their homework on the subject. They range from the popular Lone Wolf version of events to narratives that are almost too wild to believe. It delves incredibly deep into not just the perpetrator, but to those who knew him in some fashion to varying degrees. In Aberration in the Heartland , Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.