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Zusatztext 79904480 Informationen zum Autor Maria Konnikova is the author of Mastermind and The Confidence Game . She is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker, and has written for the Atlantic , the New York Times, Slate, the New Republic, the Paris Review, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, the Boston Globe, the Scientific American MIND, WIRED, and Smithsonian . Maria graduated from Harvard University and received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University. Klappentext "It's a startling and disconcerting read that should make you think twice every time a friend of a friend offers you the opportunity of a lifetime." -Erik Larson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dead Wake and bestselling author of Devil in the White City Think you can't get conned? Think again. The New York Times bestselling author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes explains how to spot the con before they spot you. "[An] excellent study of Con Artists, stories & the human need to believe" -Neil Gaiman, via Twitter A compelling investigation into the minds, motives, and methods of con artists-and the people who fall for their cons over and over again. While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true conmen-the Bernie Madoffs, the Jim Bakkers, the Lance Armstrongs-are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. How do they do it? Why are they successful? And what keeps us falling for it, over and over again? These are the questions that journalist and psychologist Maria Konnikova tackles in her mesmerizing new book. From multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes to small-time frauds, Konnikova pulls together a selection of fascinating stories to demonstrate what all cons share in common, drawing on scientific, dramatic, and psychological perspectives. Insightful and gripping, the book brings readers into the world of the con, examining the relationship between artist and victim. The Confidence Game asks not only why we believe con artists, but also examines the very act of believing and how our sense of truth can be manipulated by those around us. INTRODUCTION The aristocrats of crime. —DAVID MAURER Dr. Joseph Cyr, a surgeon lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy, walked onto the deck of the HMCS Cayuga . It was September 1951, the second year of the Korean War, and the Cayuga was making her way north of the thirty-eighth parallel, just off the shore of North Korea. The morning had gone smoothly enough; no sickness, no injuries to report. But just as the afternoon was getting on, the lookouts spotted something that didn’t quite fit with the watery landscape: a small, cramped Korean junk that was waving a flag and frantically making its way toward the ship. Within the hour, the rickety boat had pulled up alongside the Cayuga . Inside was a mess of bodies, nineteen in all, piled together in obvious filth. They looked close to death. Mangled torsos, bloody, bleeding heads, limbs that turned the wrong way or failed to turn at all. Most of them were no more than boys. They had been caught in an ambush, a Korean liaison officer soon explained to the Cayuga ’s crew; the messy bullet and shrapnel wounds were the result. That’s why Dr. Cyr had been summoned from below deck: he was the only man with any medical qualification on board. He would have to operate—and soon. Without his intervention, all nineteen men would very likely die. Dr. Cyr began to prepare his kit. There was only one problem. Dr. Cyr didn’t hold a medical degree, let alone the proper qualifications required to undertake complex surgery aboard a moving ship. In fact, he’d never even graduated high school. And his real name wasn’t Cyr. It was Ferdinand Waldo Demara, or, as he would eventually become known, the...
