BEHIND THE SHOCK MACHINE

Putting a human face on the experiments by interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted by what they did—and delving deep into Milgram’s personal archive, she pieces together a much more complex and troubling picture than Milgram originally presented. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the interactions between experimenters and their subjects, the book offers a gripping tale of one man’s ambition and the experiment that still sparks controversy even today.

“Riveting…[Perry’s] chilling investigation of the experiments and their aftereffects suggests that Milgram manipulated results, misled the public, and flat out lied in order to deflect criticism and further the thesis for which he would become famous: that the Holocaust could have happened in New Haven…Perry’s research should change the way we view Milgram’s work.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Thanks to Perry’s book, we gain more insight than ever before into Milgram’s questionable practices and the scientific culture that allowed his experiment to take place.”
—Scientific American

“A passionate text that humanizes the subjects and provides nuanced, provocative context to the experiments. The author asks profound questions about what truths, if any, can be elicited from analysis of human nature in a constructed environment. It”s about time someone wrote this book.”
—Kirkus Reviews