Dimensions
126 x 203 x 17mm
A New York Review Books Classic.
This is a Swiftian tribute to that unappreciated mainstay of civilisation: 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.
