There are some very strong chapters which make one look into the abyss called humanity and recognise the complexities that goes beyond “that person does evil things, they are so inhuman”. I think we’re so prone to assign responsibilities when things go wrong to a specific person/group, because the alternative that such “evil” things are so natural to human and a combination of environment and chance can lead us there too. It is also more comforting to think that once we eliminate the person who wronged, we’ll be safe. I appreciate the chapters that call for more nuances in thinking about “evil”. The research underlying this topic is therefore relevant to discussions on criminal justice, terrorism, norms, and philosophy in general. I wish there are even more discussion on research though. Sometimes the book just stops short when I want to know more - but too lazy to go hunt the paper myself, which is why I buy a pop-sci book. Well, guess I’ll be rarely satisfied. By trying to understand paedophilia we are not dismissing the realities of child sexual abuse, nor are we condoning or normalising the issue. Instead, we can work towards a world where we are in a better position to deal with the reality of the issue. Paedophilia has always existed, and always will. Flippantly dismissing it as an aberration helps no one. Quite a hard one to rate. I attended the author’s talk which was rather fun and raises many interesting topics and convinced me to buy the book.

Sometimes there's too much minutiae, reporter politics and intrigue -- this district attorney, that reporter, this article, that detective. Lordamighty. This is already an incredibly complex web of connections, without all of that stuff, so I felt there's some sections that could use some abridgement. Terry also throws a lot of theories around which aren't fully explored. It's implied that some of the Son of Sam murders were committed to distract from other crimes. That's an interesting idea, but I didn't feel it was resolved.AM Homes’s novel The End of Alice, depicting the epistolary relationship between a teenage girl and an older jailed man, takes elements of Alice in Wonderland, turns them on their head, and sends the reader down the darkest of rabbit holes. Searingly intelligent and horrifying, but never exploitative, no novel has ever unsettled me more.” Brad “DJ Aural” Latendresse But that’s not all, this series is having a movie adaptation! yes, it is confirmed, and it will be available on Netflix. Big stars will be on the cast, like Charlize Theron and Laurence Fishburne! Let’s hope it becomes a success and it doesn’t get canceled, as it happened to the I read it during a particularly low period in my life. I was going through a divorce, living in a friend’s part converted garage which had no insulation or heating. It was the dead of winter, minus 15 outside, during the big freeze we had in early 2010. You could spend the time left drowning your sorrows, giving away all your possessions in preparation for the rapture, or laughing it off as (hopefully) just another hoax. Or you could just try to do something about it.

The Rape of Nanjing by Iris Chang is still unfinished on my bookshelf. It is a well researched book that details the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese war but it is difficult to face the detailed descriptions of their inhumanity to fellow human beings and I had to put it aside. Maybe I will steel myself to finish it one day.” lwb48_zh For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ” What surprised me is that, despite the ensuing years of seeing the above three groups fighting over this book, Terry's book is actually very lucid and down-to-earth for the most part. The long path to the throne has only just begun for Aelin Galathynius as war looms on the horizon. Loyalties have been broken and bought, friends have been lost and gained, and those who possess magic find themselves at odds with those who don't.She approached her writing with an occasional “holier-than-thou” tone that came across like, “I know this is how the world should work and the rest of you should just shut up.” When we understand what leads to harm, we can begin to fight against it. This involves taking action to stop harm, fighting against our own urges to do harm, and helping people who have done harm to get better. And whatever we stand for, fight for, feel for, we must never dehumanise people. There were also a lot of contradicting arguments in the book. One that stood out to me was Shaw’s stance on porn – it’s not that bad and we should stop being so critical of the porn industry and those obsessed with it, and maybe we should allow porn to be used in health classes. But later in the book goes on to wag her finger at misogyny, chastising society for allowing ourselves to become over-saturated with images of women that promote an unhealthy idea of sex and women’s bodies, ultimately leading to demeaning women in society.

After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin. I really wanted to like this, but absolutely didn’t like this, and frankly, parts of it are so off-putting I want to toss it out a window. People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it’s only natural to be sceptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. But what if, for once, the predictions are right, and the apocalypse really is due to arrive next Saturday, just after tea? The fact that both Carrs met with particularly messy ends, is not surprising either- being low level criminals and dullard thugs. Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.

Subscribe

The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality. If the Hutus were simply rational, they wouldn’t have killed the Tutsis, and so forth. Thus, our response to what we see as evil takes an essentially pedagogical form. We first try therapy to increase the malefactor’s rational capacity, and when that fails, we turn to legal punishment. But this leaves us with no conceptual framework for distinguishing between the simply bad act and the evil one. In short, secularism has no explanation of evil.

While it's tempting to write this off as, yes, a conspiracy theory, the fact remains that it is entirely possible that groups with stations across the country are involved in drug-smuggling and dealing and Terry suggests motives behind the Tate-Labianca murders that make far more sense than the "Beatles told me to do it" theory of Vincent Bugliosi (to be fair, Bugliosi was stressed for time and had to get a conviction on Manson - he had plenty of other theories, some of which support Terry's, but the police's refusal to look beneath the surface of a crazy story - like Burkowitz's dog - hindered much of it). This is to some extent a pessimistic conclusion. There are people who write as if all we need to do is recognise the human qualities in each other and violence and cruelty will magically come to an end and we’ll all live happily ever after. I wish this were true but I don’t think it is. From a "how seriously should I take this guy" perspective, I should probably also note that if the transcripts of the interviews Terry and his associates conducted with Berkowitz are accurate, they are at times very leading and allow Berkowitz to make non-committal responses that could be interpreted as supporting Terry's theories. Terry also claims to have found and removed evidence from a crime scene, which confused and dismayed me. All of Hubert Selby Jr’s output is hard going, but for sheer bleakness, Last Exit to Brooklyn comes out top (or should that be bottom?) Why I read it a second time, I’ll never know. The film introduces a happy ending where there isn’t one in the book, if memory serves - Tra La La survives the gang rape/torture. Some happy ending. Bleakbleakbleak.” musicforpleasureI resonate to her way of thinking because it chimes well with my own interest in the ‘moral’ quality of violence: when people who do bad things think they are doing the right thing, out of a sense that they are morally right. Morality explains a lot of the terrible things that we do to one another. This claim isn’t unique to Manne or to me, of course. Another book that could have ended up on my list is Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai which argues that a lot of violence is motivated by moral principles—it summarises a lot of interesting research in this area. After all the op-ed style writing and soap-boxing, everything comes down to the semantics of the word “evil,” instead of the actual science behind people who have dark, objectively negative impulses and how science explains these things. He does make that connection. The response to horror movies, and our response to the Holocaust, or to Nanking, are not entirely dissimilar. There are similar itches that are being scratched. One might be for recreation and one might be for scholarly study or concern about the future of humanity, but there is a lot of common ground. Classic piece of sensationalist trash that falls under the category of 'Satanic Panic'literature, an hysterical craze that swept most of the US and other Western countries in the late 1980s that was based on the premise that a vast network of Satanic cults had infiltrated all levels of modern society.