Customer Reviews

Dark Justice: The History of Punishment and Torture

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This is a wonderful starting-point for research into the history of crime and punishment. It's a coffee-table sized book, and is chock-full of illustrations. Frankly, it's the illustrations you want to see when reading about a subject like this. There are photos and descriptions of torture implements, woodcuttings of torture chambers, and observers' accounts.

This is not the stuff of pleasant dreams, but it is what thousands of people have experienced.

Dark Justice is an oversize coffee table book with very large pictures and bite size articles that is fun and interesting to read. The book covers ancient forms of punishment up to our present. It's very intriguing though the book doesn't go too much in depth, choosing rather to gloss over large periods of time or focus on very specific personal stories regarding specific people. As a coffee table book this is acceptable, and considering the subject matter it's probably appropriate not too get too fixated on the details. But it'll leave you wanting to know more, which may or may not be a good thing considering how much time you may have.

My favorite section is the first half of the book, from ancient times to the French Revolution. The ancient Greeks' forms of punishment are especially shocking.

Some stories will definitely catch your attention. Such as Caligula's realization he can have anyone beheaded at his whim or the only known person in recorded history that actually survived an electric chair execution.

If I have a complain is that all the people executed are referred to as victims. Surely we can agree that a 9-year-old boy being hanged for stealing a loaf of bread is excessive but more unsavory characters were also executed. I am against the death penalty personally but the author's bias is definitely something that comes through the book, which may alienate some readers.

DARK JUSTICE is a book for an older person. This book is about what they did to people in the Middle Ages and earlier. It tells what a person would suffer if he was a warlock or she was a which. Any crime that you could think of is in this book. It tells also what would happen to the person if he or she was to commit a crime. Usually it was a painful and slow death. This bood is definitaly for older people.