'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of ... (ISBN 0743275098)

Wait till this one hits the Clearance racks, here's the lowdown on this::
If you are a True Crime fan, then you MAY want to buy this book but you should know something about what this book contains first, as well as the fact that the title is a bit misleading. This book isn't ONLY about the Mind of the Killer Spouse but a look at the pros and cons of love and marriage as well. If you are looking only for True Crime stories, you'll have to read a lot of theory and research along the way, much of it about marriage and why people get married, etc. The first chapter is particularly heavy on the marriage research aspect of things, including a section about why people marry in the first place,along with such depressing details as the fact that a huge percentage of men and women (even those without murder in their hearts) are unfaithful. You have to get through that before you really start to get to specific cases of spousal murder. It is pretty dry stuff, unless you are MOSTLY interested in research about marriage. If that doesn't dissuade you and you are willing to read about various theories in between the accounts of the various crimes, this might be worth a browse for you. But some of these cases HAVE been covered in detail before, including the one of Pamela Smart, a media services worker at school who got her much younger 15 year old lover to agree to be a hit man and murder her husband. If you are a true crime reader, you may already be familiar with this case and others in the book. I think the Pamela Smart case was actually covered much better in the book To Die For (although it is a fictionalized version of the case) as well as the movie by the same name (starring Nicole Kidman in a tour de force performance). In my opinion, this author needed either a better editor, proofreader or writer friend to help get rid of the drier material and hone in on the main points and focus onn the actual cases. I found this to be a pretty dull read - and that is saying a lot for a book which SHOULD be inherently pretty exciting and interesting, simply because of the subject matter. True Crime is a popular subject....but you, the reader, can do better than this one.

Shallow and badly in need of a proof reader:
I did buy this book a while back at Barnes and Noble. It is perfect for those who read at lower than 8th grade level, but for the rest of us, it's an insult. I wish I could sell it back. I found it extremely shallow and not very well proof-read. I started recording the errors after coming across several before page 70. Now, you might think that a few grammatical errors in the first 70 pages is not too much and I guess it wouldn't be if the errors had not been so easy to catch. So anyway, I started recording them after page 70 and on page 75, halfway down, there reads, "A sociopath is someone who habitually and disobeys social norms and fails to learn..." What's with that? "...someone who habitually AND disobeys..."??? The "and" is out of place. On page 74, did they mean to say "...was sentenced to sixty years TO life in prison."? One last one, page 153, 2nd paragraph, "Susan's sister testified that she had intervened during one of the couple's ARGUMENT,..." I think it should be "...one of the couple's ARGUMENTS." With an "s" at the end. Shouldn't it? So anyway, those are just a few of the ones I picked out. They wouldn't have been so bad had the book not been so shallow.

For what it is, it's useful...:
Wow. Reading the first 17 reviews of this book indicates that Dr. Ludwig has touched quite a nerve. There is a review by a friend of one of the spouse killers profiled, and one by a near-victim of a spouse killer. I have been a domestic violence social worker/counselor for 23 years, and it seems to me, that for a "popular" treatment of the problem, Ludwig hasn't done a bad job. Men kill their wives and ex-wives, girlfriends and exes, in only slightly greater numbers than women kill their male partners, or pay someone else to kill them, or seduce a new lover into killing them. Mental illness, greed, lust, revenge, substance abuse, etc. are not exclusive woes for one gender only. Dr. Ludwig and her co-writer suggest that there are ten prime motives for such murders, with overlapping features in many cases. That seems to fit my professional experience, too. The only thing I did not like about the book is that it needed an editor who could help the authors improve their sentence constructions, and a proofreader who might have caught the half-dozen typos that made it between hard-covers. Those flaws, however, are not uncommon in these days of computerization being trusted to catch spelling or grammatical errors. Computers can't supply the common sense communication decisions that a skilled human editor or proof-reader might. Dr. Ludwig, to judge by her dust jacket photo, is beautiful as well as smart, and it's no wonder she shows up on TV programs with Nancy Grace and Larry King. The book seems aimed at those viewers, and in that sense, it is a success. It is a beginning look at a very complex and tragic dynamic, not the solution, nor the scientific explanation. Get it from the library instead of paying for it, if you don't have a personal or professional interest in the topic. It is terrible that marriage is life-threatening when it goes wrong, wonderful and life-enriching only when it goes well. But it's the truth.

Rethinking the marriage vows:
Plan on finishing this book once you start reading it. Not only are you given a factual account of the crime, you are also presented with the psychological analysis for the motivation. Each chapter chronicles a different psychosis, providing the reader with a clinical view of the criminal's state of mind. Incredibly insightful and compelling.

Outstanding work!:
Robi Ludwig has written a fantastic book for her audience and others who may want to get a high level and engaging view of stories that captivate international audiences. A fast read, this book reviews more than a dozen cases of spousal murder that have happened in recent history and discusses the psychological underpinnings that lead to this sort of marital termination. Ludwig reviews murder cases with more depth than a typical newspaper expose' or magazine article but does not become suffocatingly clinical. Building on her early history of work with every day americans as a social worker and her post PHD relationship counseling practice in Manhattan, Dr. Ludwig interviewed and got first hand knowledge of many of the people discussed in her book. Only by seeing the extremes of what mental or sociopathic illness can do to relationships can we diagnose the inflection points and unhealthy relationship practices that lead to familial and societal breakdown. Like some of the reviewers here, I also have several degrees from Ivy League institutions and am the son of a psychiatric nurse. I found her academic treatment of the topic for introductory purposes, EXCELLENT!