The Torture Machine

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The Truth Machines

Author : Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0472054392
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis The Truth Machines by : Jinee Lokaneeta

Download or read book The Truth Machines written by Jinee Lokaneeta and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of "truth serum," Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention"--

Infernal Device

Author : Erik Ruhling
Publisher : Red Wheel Weiser
ISBN 13 : 160925905X
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Infernal Device by : Erik Ruhling

Download or read book Infernal Device written by Erik Ruhling and published by Red Wheel Weiser. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Erik Ruhling assembles an unmatched array of torture tools invented exclusively for the infliction of pain and the ending of life, each carefully researched with an accompanying full-color, highly detailed rendering. This beautifully presented book features classics like the Iron Maiden and the Guillotine, as well as more rarified connoisseur’s fare such as the Scavenger’s Daughter and the Ear Chopper. And if the Tongue Tearer is not to your taste, there’s always the Breast Ripper or the Drunkard’s Cloak.

The Torture Letters

Author : Laurence Ralph
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022672980X
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis The Torture Letters by : Laurence Ralph

Download or read book The Torture Letters written by Laurence Ralph and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

The Torture Machine

Author : Flint Taylor
Publisher : Haymarket Books
ISBN 13 : 1608468968
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis The Torture Machine by : Flint Taylor

Download or read book The Torture Machine written by Flint Taylor and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

In The Penal Colony

Author : Franz Kafka
Publisher : Memorable Classics Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 31 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis In The Penal Colony by : Franz Kafka

Download or read book In The Penal Colony written by Franz Kafka and published by Memorable Classics Books. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka ("In der Strafkolonie") (also translated as "In the Penal Settlement") is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. Synopsis: The story focuses on the Traveler, who has just arrived in an island penal colony and is encountering its brutal execution machine for the first time. Everything about the functioning of the intricate machine and its purpose and history is told to him by the Officer. The Soldier and the Condemned, who is unaware that he has been sentenced to die for failing to get up and salute his superior's door each hour during his night watch, placidly watch from nearby. Under the judicial process associated with the machine, the accused is always assumed to be guilty and is not given a chance to defend himself. As punishment, the law the man has broken is inscribed progressively deeper on his body over a period of 12 hours as he slowly dies from his wounds. During their final six hours in the machine, the accused become still and appear to experience a religious epiphany. The machine was designed by the colony's previous Commandant, of whom the Officer is a devoted supporter. He carries its blueprints with him and is the only person who can decipher them, not allowing anyone else to handle them. Eventually, it becomes clear that the machine has fallen out of favor since the death of the previous Commandant and the appointment of a successor. The Officer is nostalgic regarding the torture device and the values that were initially associated with it, recalling the crowds that used to attend each execution. Now, he is the last outspoken proponent of the machine, but he strongly believes in its form of justice and the infallibility of the previous Commandant.

The Psychopath Machine

Author : Steve Smith
Publisher : FriesenPress
ISBN 13 : 1460287851
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis The Psychopath Machine by : Steve Smith

Download or read book The Psychopath Machine written by Steve Smith and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Steve Smith set out to hitchhike from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario to Canada’s west coast back in 1968, he was just an eighteen-year-old hippie with an appetite for adventure. But a short way into his journey, a reckless decision to steal a car landed him in police custody. Afraid of getting caught with the two tabs of acid in his pocket, Steve popped them into his mouth. It was one of the worst decisions of his life. Mistaking his drug trip for a mental breakdown, the authorities placed him in Ontario’s notorious Oak Ridge mental health facility. While there, not only did he find himself shoulder-to-shoulder with people like notorious child killer Peter Woodcock and mass murderers Matt Lamb and Victor Hoffman, he also fell into the hands of someone worse: Dr. Elliot T. Barker. Over the next eight months, Barker subjected Steve and the other patients to a battery of unorthodox experiments involving LSD, scopolamine, methamphetamines, and other drugs. Steven also experienced numerous other forms of abuse and torture. Following his release, Steve continued to suffer the aftereffects of his Oak Ridge experience. For several years, he found himself in and out of prison—and back to Oak Ridge—before he was finally able to establish himself as a successful entrepreneur. Once he began investigating what happened to him during his youth, not even Steve was prepared for what he would discover about Barker, Oak Ridge, and one of the darkest periods in Canada’s treatment of mental health patients. The question remains: Was Oak Ridge and Dr. Barker trying to cure psychopaths or trying to create and direct them?

Beyond the Usual Beating

Author : Andrew S. Baer
Publisher : Historical Studies of Urban America
ISBN 13 : 022670047X
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis Beyond the Usual Beating by : Andrew S. Baer

Download or read book Beyond the Usual Beating written by Andrew S. Baer and published by Historical Studies of Urban America. This book was released on 2020 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The malign influence of Chicago police commander Jon Burge cannot be overestimated. While it can scarcely be said that Burge was the only violently racist Chicago cop, he has become the very emblem of police brutality and unequal treatment for nonwhite people, and his actions have had widespread reverberations. During his many years on the force, Burge used barbaric methods, including electric shock, beatings, burnings, and mock executions, to coerce confessions and information from the guilty and the innocent alike. After exposure of his actions in 1989, Burge became a totem for police racism in Chicago and nationwide. Andrew S. Baer here shows that Burge arose from a particular milieu, and his actions fueled resistance that might not otherwise have cohered so powerfully"--

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Author : Janet Cardiff
Publisher : Hatje Cantz Pub
ISBN 13 : 9783775720021
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller by : Janet Cardiff

Download or read book Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller written by Janet Cardiff and published by Hatje Cantz Pub. This book was released on 2007 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise retrospective, this publication contains previously unpublished written and visual material, as well as pertinent literature on the oeuvre of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. SPECIALIST

The Sewing Machine

Author : Natalie Fergie
Publisher : Unbound Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1911586246
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (115 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sewing Machine by : Natalie Fergie

Download or read book The Sewing Machine written by Natalie Fergie and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 100,000 copies sold 'A tapestry of strong characters and accomplished writing' Herald Scotland It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, in Edinburgh, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than a hundred years after his grandmother’s sewing machine was made, Fred discovers a treasure trove of documents. His family history is laid out before him in a patchwork of unfamiliar handwriting and colourful seams. He starts to unpick the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.

Colonial Terror

Author : Deana Heath
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192646168
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Colonial Terror by : Deana Heath

Download or read book Colonial Terror written by Deana Heath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Lie Detection and the Law

Author : Andrew Balmer
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317518403
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (175 download)

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Book Synopsis Lie Detection and the Law by : Andrew Balmer

Download or read book Lie Detection and the Law written by Andrew Balmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a sociological account of lie detection practices and uses this to think about lying more generally. Bringing together insights from sociology, social history, socio-legal studies and science and technology studies (STS), it explores how torture and technology have been used to try to discern the truth. It examines a variety of socio-legal practices, including trial by ordeal in Europe, the American criminal jury trial, police interrogations using the polygraph machine, and the post-conviction management of sex offenders in the USA and the UK. Moving across these different contexts, it articulates how uncertainties in the use of lie detection technologies are managed, and the complex roles they play in legal spaces. Alongside this story, the book surveys some of the different ways in which lying is understood in philosophy, law and social order. Lie Detection and the Law will be of interest to STS researchers, socio-legal scholars, criminologists and sociologists, as well as others working at the intersections of law and science.

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Author : Maya Schenwar
Publisher : Haymarket Books
ISBN 13 : 1608466841
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (84 download)

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Book Synopsis Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? by : Maya Schenwar

Download or read book Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? written by Maya Schenwar and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and reports examining the reality of police violence against Black and brown communities in America. What is the reality of policing in the United States? Do the police keep anyone safe and secure other than the very wealthy? How do recent police killings of young Black people in the United States fit into the historical and global context of anti-blackness? This collection of reports and essays (the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books) explores police violence against Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of Black men and women, police violence against Latino and indigenous communities, law enforcement’s treatment of pregnant people and those with mental illness, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting. There are also specific stories such as a Detroit police conspiracy to slap murder convictions on young Black men using police informant, and the failure of Chicago’s much-touted Independent Police Review Authority, the body supposedly responsible for investigating police misconduct. The title Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is no mere provocation: the book also explores alternatives for keeping communities safe. Contributors include William C. Anderson, Candice Bernd, Aaron Cantú, Thandi Chimurenga, Ejeris Dixon, Adam Hudson, Victoria Law, Mike Ludwig, Sarah Macaraeg, and Roberto Rodriguez. Praise for Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? “With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of Black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions.” —Chicago Review of Books “A must-read for anyone seeking to understand American culture in the present day.” —Xica Nation “This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-Black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state.” —Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation

My Midnight Years

Author : Ronald Kitchen
Publisher : Chicago Review Press
ISBN 13 : 1613737696
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (137 download)

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Book Synopsis My Midnight Years by : Ronald Kitchen

Download or read book My Midnight Years written by Ronald Kitchen and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ronald Kitchen was 21, on his way to buy milk for his four-year-old, when he was picked up by the Chicago police, brutally tortured, and coerced to confess to five counts of heinous murder. He spent 22 years in prison, 13 of those on death row. Kitchen was only one of the many victims of Jon Burge and his notorious Midnight Crew—118 others have come forward so far. Kitchen cofounded the Death Row 10 from his maximum security cellblock and fought together with those men to expose the grave injustices that led to their wrongful convictions. The Death Row 10 appeared on nationwide media and, with the help of lawyers and activists outside, were instrumental in turning the tide against the death penalty in Illinois. Kitchen was finally exonerated in 2013 and filed a high profile lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department, Jon Burge, Mayor Richard Daley, and the Cook County state's attorney. Largely absent from the current social justice narratives are the testimonies of the victims themselves. Kitchen is a survivor who has turned his suffering into a powerful public cause. The atrocities of the Midnight Crew have been brought to light through Kitchen's work and are now part of the discussion as the nation engages in an unprecedented conversation about racism.

The Femicide Machine

Author : Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 1584351101
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (843 download)

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Book Synopsis The Femicide Machine by : Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez

Download or read book The Femicide Machine written by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-01-13 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account and analysis of the systematic murder of women and girls in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez. In Ciudad Juarez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn't just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guarantee impunity for those crimes and even legalize them. A lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis. The facts speak for themselves. —from The Femicide Machine Best known to American readers for his cameo appearances as The Journalist in Roberto Bolano's 2666 and as a literary detective in Javier Marías's novel Dark Back of Time, Sergio González Rodríguez is one of Mexico's most important contemporary writers. He is the author of Bones in the Desert, the most definitive work on the murders of women and girls in Juárez, Mexico, as well as The Headless Man, a sharp meditation on the recurrent uses of symbolic violence; Infectious, a novel; and Original Evil, a long essay. The Femicide Machine is the first book by González Rodríguez to appear in English translation. Written especially for Semiotext(e) Intervention series, The Femicide Machine synthesizes González Rodríguez's documentation of the Juárez crimes, his analysis of the unique urban conditions in which they take place, and a discussion of the terror techniques of narco-warfare that have spread to both sides of the border. The result is a gripping polemic. The Femicide Machine probes the anarchic confluence of global capital with corrupt national politics and displaced, transient labor, and introduces the work of one of Mexico's most eminent writers to American readers.

The Metamorphosis + In the Penal Colony (2 contemporary translations by Ian Johnston)

Author : Franz Kafka
Publisher : e-artnow
ISBN 13 : 8074849651
Total Pages : 107 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (748 download)

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Book Synopsis The Metamorphosis + In the Penal Colony (2 contemporary translations by Ian Johnston) by : Franz Kafka

Download or read book The Metamorphosis + In the Penal Colony (2 contemporary translations by Ian Johnston) written by Franz Kafka and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2013-11-10 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully crafted ebook: “The Metamorphosis + In the Penal Colony (2 contemporary translations by Ian Johnston)” contains 2 books in one volume and is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It has been cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Samsa's transformation is never revealed, and Kafka never did give an explanation. The rest of Kafka's novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become. "In the Penal Colony" is a short story by Franz Kafka written in German in October 1914, and first published in October 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. In the Penal Colony describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours. As the plot unfolds, the reader learns more and more about the machine, including its origin and original justification. Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Kafka strongly influenced genres such as existentialism. Most of his works, such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations.

Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People

Author : John Conroy
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520230392
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (33 download)

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Book Synopsis Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People by : John Conroy

Download or read book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People written by John Conroy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-09-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of torture (in the name of the state) in three democracies (Israel, Northern Ireland, and the United States) by John Conroy, a Chicago journalist with a strong following among readers who know his previous book (a war diary of life in Belfast).

Death by Sheer Torture

Author : Robert Barnard
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476716269
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis Death by Sheer Torture by : Robert Barnard

Download or read book Death by Sheer Torture written by Robert Barnard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspector Perry Trethowan reads in the obituaries that his estranged father has died under peculiar circumstances: he was fooling around with a form of self-torture called strappado. At the request of his supervisor, Peter returns to his ancestral home to determine if any of his cousins or siblings might have helped the old man to his bizarre end.