Volume 7, Number 6 · October 20, 1966
A Violent Country
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
A Sign for Cain: An Exploration in Human Violence
by Fredric Wertham M.D.
Macmillan, 386 pp., $6.95
A Sign for Cain is indeed, as its dustjacket claims, a provocative book, though not so good a one as its wealth of material and the frequently stimulating insights of its author lead one to expect. It is certainly enormously concrete. Dr. Wertham's catalogue is long, through every passion ranging; he seems to have total recall for every foul deed of this century, from high-school initiations to Guernica, and many earlier. He provides an annotated list of the concentration camps of Greater Germany in 1945—there were twenty-three, many with specialized functions—and his topics extend from comic books to the McNaughton—to use his spelling—rule for legal insanity. His writing is erudite but cranky, with occasional lapses like his reference to '.024 per cent per 100,000' persons who died in automobile accidents in 1952. But nothing seems to have been omitted. In spite of its very considerable redeeming social significance, if violence turns you on you'll enjoy A Sign for Cain thoroughly.
Review, 3286 words
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