Volume 33, Number 3 · February 27, 1986
Unspeakable Acts
By Peter Singer
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
by Elaine Scarry
Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $24.95
Torture
by Edward Peters
Basil Blackwell, 202 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Elaine Scarry and Edward Peters both teach at the University of Pennsylvania—she teaches English, and he medieval history. Peters has just published a history of torture, and Scarry a book that takes torture as its starting point. There the resemblance ends. Peters has written a straightforward historical account of torture, from the ancient world to the most recent Amnesty International report. Scarry has much greater ambition, as her subtitle announces. She claims to find, in the nature of pain, the key to understanding human creativity and human destructiveness.
Review, 4444 words
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