Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
Adam's Umbrella
By Charles Simic
How to Quiet a Vampire
by Borislav Peki´c, translated from the Serbian by Stephen M. Dickey and Bogdan Rakic
Northwestern University Press, 456 pp., $18.95 (paper)
The first visual record of police interrogation we have comes from a XII Dynasty tomb in Egypt, two thousand years before Christ. The image shows a man being held by three others while the fourth one beats him with a bamboo stick and the fifth, who appears to be the one in charge, supervises the procedure. The sight is disheartening, Borislav Peki´c comments. In four thousand years not much has changed. Prisoners still get beaten. And that's not the worst that happens to them, of course. There have been many refinements since the pharaohs in methods of inducing physical and mental pain. We must give credit to the Holy Inquisition, which contributed more than any other institution to the development of the role of the interrogator. The Inquisitors' techniques of persuasion were especially admired by modern totalitarian states where ideological heresy likewise came to be regarded as a capital crime.
Review, 4096 words
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