A Handbook on Hanging

Download or read book A Handbook on Hanging written by Charles Duff and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1999-10-31 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.