A Handbook on Hanging

By Charles Duff
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

A Handbook on Hanging is a Swiftian tribute to that unappreciated mainstay of civilization: the hangman. With barbed insouciance, Charles Duff writes not only of hanging but of electrocution, decapitations, and gassings; of innocent men executed and of executions botched; of the bloodlust of mobs and the shabby excuses of the great. This coruscating and, in contemporary America, very relevant polemic makes clear that whatever else capital punishment may be said to be—justice, vengeance, a deterrent—it is certainly killing.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

In its literary aspect it is deftly done. Smoothly, earnestly, unctuously the author carries on his defense of hanging as a fine art and his plea for bigger and better and more frequent hangings, never for a moment forgetting his pose or dropping his disguise, and never giving the reader the least ground for suspecting his good faith . . . He has made for the crusade against capital punishment a very effective stroke.
— The New York Times

Also see:

On the Yard By Malcolm Braly Introduction by Jonathan Lethem A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism.

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