Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
Killer Children
By Hilary Mantel
Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell
by Gitta Sereny
Metropolitan Books, 382 pp., $26.00
It happened, once upon a time, that the Marquis de Sade was in a good humor. He wrote a novel Aline and Valcour, in which he created a utopia. In Tamoë there was no capital punishment. If society had to take measures against a murderer, it put him in a boat with a month's supplies, and launched him on the tide to meet his fate: to become, perhaps, someone else's problem. At any rate, the people of Tamoë did not have to think about him again, and were able to return to their sun-soaked, caring-and-sharing South Pacific lives.
Review, 4034 words
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