This is the sem­i­nal work on the anthro­pol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy of ser­ial killing. I read it in con­junc­tion with an NFB doc­u­men­tary film “The Man Who Stud­ies Mur­der”, which puts a face to the voice of the book. Ley­ton is a coun­try boy from small-town Saskatchewan (who looks and sounds dis­tinctly Metis, though I can’t say for sure that he is) and now lives in New­found­land. New­found­land is rur­al, poor by North Amer­i­can stan­dards, and vir­tu­ally every house has a gun. Eco­nom­i­cally, it’s the Cana­dian equiv­a­lent of Arkansas. But it has one of the low­est mur­der rates in the world. In the film, Ley­ton dis­cusses the rea­sons why he con­sid­ers cul­tural choic­es and mores the prin­ci­pal deter­mi­nant of mur­der rates and styles of mur­der, often using his home as a laboratory.

The book on ser­ial and mass killers, deal­ing with the “clas­sic” cas­es, attempts to get beyond the kind of unver­i­fi­able psy­chi­atric spec­u­la­tions that dom­i­nated the issue before Ley­ton came on the scene. As he demon­strates, psy­chi­a­try has been of lit­tle use in under­stand­ing the phe­nom­e­non. He shows the fun­da­men­tal sim­i­lar­i­ties in most ser­ial killings, and does his best to deflate the non­sense gen­er­ated by Thomas Harris’s “Han­ni­bal Lecter” fan­tasies. Ser­ial killers are invari­ably pathet­ic, inef­fec­tive losers, usu­ally pret­ty dumb.…. nev­er the suave super­ge­niuses of fic­tion. Ley­ton rejects bio­log­i­cal and psy­chi­atric expla­na­tions in favour of a cul­tural one, and argues it per­sua­sively. He may not have the last word on this issue, but his opin­ions are more worth read­ing than most. He is also a wit­ty and enter­tain­ing writer ― and from the evi­dence of the film, has the same qual­i­ties in person.

This book caught my eye because it’s heroes are from the coast of Hudson’s Bay, a nos­tal­gic place for me. Two Cree lads from Moose Fac­tory fight in the trench­es of World War I. Boy­den writes beau­ti­fully, is famil­iar with Cree cul­ture, and researched WWI trench war­fare with a historian’s skill. The book com­pares well with the clas­sic Cana­dian nov­el of WWI, Tim­o­thy Findlay’s The Wars. The Great War of 1914–1918 had a tremen­dous impact on Cana­da — far more than on the Unit­ed States. Cana­da was involved dur­ing the entire length of the war, had twice as many sol­diers on the front per-capi­ta as the U.S., and one Cana­dian fam­ily in five suf­fered a casu­alty. The war end­ed the desire of most Cana­di­ans to keep any seri­ous polit­i­cal ties with Britain, and scarred an entire gen­er­a­tion. So it isn’t sur­pris­ing that WWI nov­els con­tinue to be writ­ten, and loom large in Cana­dian lit­er­a­ture. This is a wor­thy exam­ple. Read more »

Edward is a pale­on­tol­o­gist who did impor­tant work on the Per­mian Extinc­tion, a peri­od in Earth’s his­tory that seems to have under­gone a cat­a­stro­phe even more spec­tac­u­lar than the bet­ter known Cre­ta­ceous mete­or impact that turned the dinosaurs to toast. In the mass extinc­tions that took place 248 mil­lion years ago, nine­ty to nine­ty-five per­cent of marine species were elim­i­nated, and on land a com­plex pro­to-mam­malian fau­na was wiped out. Edward’s book con­tains only a sim­pli­fied sum­mary of the sci­ence. It’s pri­mar­ily auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. He did most of his research in the Great Karoo region of South Africa, and his vis­its there coin­cided with dra­matic peri­ods in South Africa. He describes the total­i­tar­ian atmos­phere dur­ing the late Apartheid era, and then the chaot­ic one of the post-Apartheid era. This, and descrip­tion of the phys­i­cal and emo­tional chal­lenges of doing hard sci­ence in the field are the rea­son to read the book.

[If you want to learn more about the Per­mi­an Extinc­tion Event, a good place to start is the Hoop­er Vir­tual Nat­ural His­tory Muse­um, run by Carl­ton Uni­ver­sity, Ottawa. It’s a user-friend­ly site, geared to the gen­eral pub­lic. A sec­tion devot­ed to “Cre­ation­ism” makes no attempt to pussy­foot with the tide of igno­rance: it begins with a primer on the four­teen most com­mon log­i­cal fal­lac­ies of argu­ment, straight out of Aristotle]

Writ­ten in 1984, when the Cold War was heat­ing up again, this is a nar­ra­tive of an Eng­lish teenager’s sur­vival after a nuclear war. Swindell attempts to con­vey the utter hope­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion. Steeped in the British class sys­tem, he assumes that the rich and pow­er­ful would do every­thing to pro­tect them­selves. and sim­ply exter­mi­nate any­one incon­ve­nient to them. Per­haps this would have been true — I don’t know British soci­ety well enough to judge. The book gives a rea­son­ably accu­rate por­trayal of the effects of a nuclear war on an ordi­nary region (at least in terms of the sci­en­tific knowl­edge then avail­able). As per­sonal dra­ma, it is very effec­tive. Peo­ple who now imag­ine that the world is a new­ly ter­ri­fy­ing place, mere­ly because a hand­ful of ter­ror­ists can plant bombs in planes, have either for­got­ten, or are inca­pable of imag­in­ing, the kind of anx­i­ety peo­ple lived under dur­ing the peri­ods when the immi­nent incin­er­a­tion of the plan­et was some­thing to wor­ry about.

Mey­er pro­vides a basic primer on the his­tory of Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­ca­sus. It’s a short vol­ume, so it can only suma­rize the com­plex­i­ties. Still, even a well-edu­cat­ed read­er is like­ly to know noth­ing about this large por­tion of the Earth. New­shounds usu­ally refer to the post-Sovi­et Cen­tral Asian republics as “the Stans”. Well, at least a flip­pant nick­name is more atten­tion than these places got before.

Despite its low pro­file in pub­lic dis­course, Cen­tral Asia has got­ten plen­ty of atten­tion from geopoliti­cal schemers and impe­r­ial pow­ers, invari­ably cre­at­ing dis­as­ters. Some­thing about the place gen­er­ates fan­tasies and delu­sions. And no coun­try is more prone to liv­ing in fan­tasy than the Unit­ed States, the lat­est impe­r­ial pow­er to decide it is going to bring enlight­en­ment to the land of the moun­tain war­rior clan and the pop­py. As Mey­er demon­strates, the delu­sional chat­ter com­ing from Wash­ing­ton is iden­ti­cal to that which emanat­ed from Britain and Romanov Rus­sia, and the Sovi­et Union when they began the same dis­as­trous projects, end­ing in defeat for them­selves and end­less mis­ery for the peo­ple of the region. Read more »

14695. (N. A. M. Rodger) The Safe­guard of the Sea ― A Naval His­to­ry of Britain, Vol.1, 660‑1649
14696. (John Dille –ed.) Time Cap­sule 1925, A His­to­ry of the Year Con­densed From the Pages
. . . . . of Time
14697. (Jon George) Faces of Mist and Time
14698. (Ray­mond W. Bak­er) Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Mon­ey and How to Renew the 
. . . . . Free-Mar­ket System
14699. (Jared Dia­mond) The Third Chimpanzee
14700. (Mervyn Peake) Gormenghast
Read more »

Swindells runs two sto­ries in par­al­lel. One is set in 19th cen­tury Lon­don, and tells of an orphan boy who encoun­ters Dr. John Snow, the founder of mod­ern epi­demi­ol­ogy, and dis­cov­erer of the cause of cholera. The sec­ond sto­ry is set in mod­ern times, and fol­lows a young girl who flees sex­ual abuse from her mother’s boyfriend, and lives in a Lon­don “squat”. Inter­spersed through these episodes are news­pa­per let­ters from a con­ser­v­a­tive crank, and the diaries of a nasty Vic­to­rian mag­is­trate. The boy’s nar­ra­tive is writ­ten in pho­netic tran­scrip­tion of his dialect, which may cause trou­ble for a Cana­dian or Amer­i­can read­er. Jug­gling these dis­parate ele­ments is a dif­fi­cult task, and the author pulls it off beau­ti­fully. The nov­el has an obvi­ous mes­sage: the strug­gle against igno­rance nev­er ceas­es. I was delight­ed that a youth nov­el like this draws atten­tion to Snow, who is one of my per­sonal heroes. The more atten­tion is paid to real­ly impor­tant his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages like Snow, the more peo­ple will under­stand the dif­fer­ence between them and the assort­ment of gang­sters, thugs, and con-men who are con­ven­tionally rep­re­sented as “great”.

Bernard DeVo­to was was one of the lead­ing Mark Twain schol­ars, as well as being a his­to­rian of the Amer­i­can far west, a pas­sion­ate advo­cate of nature con­ser­va­tion, and a lead­ing advo­cate of civ­il lib­er­ties. In this curi­ous book, writ­ten in 1932, he devotes most of his ener­gy to crit­i­ciz­ing oth­er Mark Twain Schol­ars. The book is clever, acer­bic, and some­times down­right nasty, but enter­tains pre­cisely for those rea­sons. DeVo­to detest­ed the scholas­tic habits of reify­ing abstrac­tions (The Fron­tier, Puri­tanism, The Artist, Mate­ri­al­ism) and bas­ing grand explana­tory the­o­ries on triv­ial or dubi­ous evi­dence, or no evi­dence at all. Some­times his sar­casm grates on the read­er, but often it is just so good (that is to say, cru­el, like Scot­tish humour) that it brings up a smile from that lit­tle reser­voir of mal­ice that hides some­where in even the kind­est read­er. Here is his treat­ment of one well-known pun­dit: “He exhibits the amateur’s rev­er­ence for the prin­ci­ple of ambiva­lence. This, in his lay psy­cho-analy­sis, is a device for the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of con­tra­dic­tory evi­dence. It explains that a fact can be both its lit­eral self and a sym­bol of its oppo­site, that one fact can prove a giv­en asser­tion on one page and a con­tra­dic­tory asser­tion on anoth­er, that the two facts which seem to indi­cate irrec­on­cil­able con­clu­sions real­ly mean one thing — the pre­ferred thing.” Boy, I wish I could write sar­casm of that dis­ti­lla­tion. DeVo­to could prob­a­bly take on six coral snakes and a griz­zlie before break­fast, then move on to seri­ous sar­casm after cof­fee. Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic crit­i­cism was the bab­ble of that time, but I’m sure he would make mince­meat of today’s equiv­a­lents (“post-mod­ernism”, for example).

There’s a com­mon belief, fos­tered in gen­tle soci­eties, where peo­ple expect their chil­dren to grow up, and famine nev­er stalks the land, that there is no such thing as absolute evil, and that dic­ta­tors are con­fused ide­al­ists who took a wrong turn. This, the first seri­ously researched and accu­rate biog­ra­phy of Mao Zedong, should dis­abuse any­one of such naiv­ité. I have spent most of my life­time study­ing the motives, ide­olo­gies, mech­a­nisms, and agents of slav­ery, but I was still not pre­pared for the con­tents of this book, which is one of the most impor­tant biogra­phies of mod­ern times. It is absolute­ly essen­tial that this book be in every library and school in the world, for Holo­caust Denial is the endem­ic sick­ness of our age, and the wor­ship of mass mur­der­ers the endem­ic sick­ness of all ages.

I remem­ber when col­lege cam­puses were adorned with posters of Mao, when Jean-Paul Sartre was pro­claim­ing that Mao’s “rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence” was “pro­foundly moral”, when uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors prat­tled the moron­ic, mega­lo­ma­niac slo­gans of Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book [“Pow­er comes from the muz­zle of a gun”] as if they were pro­found phi­los­o­phy, and a lawyer and fem­i­nist activist tried to slap me in the face when I told her that Mao was a geno­ci­dal crim­i­nal. I remem­ber when anoth­er stu­dent activist glee­fully showed me a pho­to­graph of one of Mao’s “projects” — thou­sands of ragged, starved, bru­tal­ized slaves dig­ging up earth with their bare hands while machine-gun-tot­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty cadrés watched over them, smok­ing cig­a­rettes, barbed wire and wood­en watch­tow­ers clear­ly vis­i­ble in the back­ground. This, he explained, was the ide­al soci­ety, Utopia being con­structed for the com­mon good. This was not even the death camps or the lao­gai, mind you, of which no pic­tures where per­mit­ted to exist, but of one of the projects the Par­ty liked to pub­li­cize. And their cal­cu­la­tions were cor­rect. To the cam­pus intel­lec­tu­als in Paris, Berke­ley, or Toron­to, such pic­tures were appeal­ing. To any actu­al human being, they could not be any­thing but hor­ri­fy­ing and dis­gust­ing. Read more »