Writing a review for Crime and Criminality is confusing. On the one hand it is exactly what it promised to be but on the other it isn't what I expected.
I really love random facts, numbers and knowing that there is a study backing these things up. Experiments with a weird premise, execution or result are what capture my excitement. So, this was the perfect book for me. And regarding my aforementioned loves, Crime and Criminality delivered. After only a couple of pages I learned a lot and kept returning to this book, though at times I felt very uncomfortable. This is afterall a scientist objectively looking at findings from studies and then coming to conclusions. But numbers and facts at times neglect humanity and empathy. In combination with pedophilia some things did make my skin crawl.
But that isn't the reason why, though I enjoyed Crime and Criminality, I didn't finish the book. While the content was interesting, it read like a textbook, so I could never get through ten, twenty pages at a time. After that I'd need time to reflect what I read, go back to mark passages or read up on more background information. While this is great when you're trying to learn something new, it doesn't make for light reading. I could not get through Crime and Criminality like I would with any other non-fiction just because the content was so heavy and the writing wasn't done with a leisure reader in mind.
I received Crime and Criminality as a digital arc from NetGalley and it took me so long to get ahead with the book that the title was archived before I could complete it. With social distancing I might have got to the end but next to being a full-time student in a different subject it was too much to get through.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* Oh, were to begin.... This book reads like a text book, and is oddly detailed and vague at the same time, painfully so.


it was hard for me to get past the first chapter where its basically argued that pedophilia is a sexuality and we should make all porn including child porn legal, and somehow it hurt less children ( but didn't answer the question on how one would make cp without harming children ) and this is creepy enough but the detail that went into playing devils advocate or whatever on it was alarming,

Then later in the book abortion is discussed and the author literally says "prochoicers don't think babies are people so they don't see abortion as bad" and that was like... the extent of them talking about prochoice side but talked much more about prolifers and how theyre morally right..... coming from the person who just argued child porn should be legal. yikes. after I got this far I the book I had to take everything further with a grain of salt since the author is apparently biased or not good at research, ,maybe both.

I found this book to be fascinating. I found it interesting how the author provides a lot of case studies and examples for his research. It was a very nice read!

CRIME AND CRIMINALITY by Ehor Boyanowsky is subtitled "Social, Psychological, and Neurobiological Explanations." I requested this title because the field of crime (serial killers, especially!) seems to be a fascinating one for many of my students. The publisher describes it as "an ideal text for criminology courses" so I was curious to how engaging the text would be. It seems that Boyanowsky covers a variety of possible factors; for example, one chapter, "Climate, Aggression, and Crime," explores the effects of temperatures and environmental crimes. Unfortunately, access has expired and I am therefore giving this text a neutral rating of three stars.