Thomas E. Gaddis — новинки

"In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don't believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damn human race including myself."

Carl Panzram, who called himself the "world's worst murderer," wrote these words in a full autobiography and confession he prepared for the one friend in his life-a young prison guard named Henry Lesser. PANZRAM: A JOURNAL OF MURDER, combines these brutally forthright memoirs with the commentary of authors Gaddis and Long, into a compelling chronicle of the forces that engender hate. The authors provide a historical and sociological framework for Panzram's own words, using this uniquely detailed self-analysis by a mass murderer to depict what happens when an intelligent and unbreakable personality that has been interminably and unmercifully abused strikes back in vengeance.

PANZRAM arrives as a gripping warning from America's recent past to our newly repressive era of prison-industrial complex, death penalty abuse, and unprecedentedly high rates of incarceration from a man who walked the halls of Death Row with a blindingly clear vision.

Introduction by Harold Schechter, author of Deranged and Deviant.

A detailed memoir and self-analysis by a mass murderer. Panzram was born in 1891 on a Minnesota farm and died in 1930 on the gallows at the U.S.Penitentiary, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Imprisoned for most of his life from the age of twelve and brutally punished, Panzram's keen insight into the arbitrary cruelty of his fellow human being is graphically illustrated with a litany of prison abuses, as well as the details of his own sordid, tragic life. Panzram arrives as a gripping warning from America's past to new prison-industrial complex era. The authors add an historical and sociological framework for Panzram's words.

It was "The Rock." Thirteen acres in the middle of San Francisco Bay, home to the most dangerous men of their time. There was no gas chamber, no gallows, no quick way out. Sealed off and separate, it brooded over its inmates.
Robert Stroud, grandson of a judge, was one. Sentenced to life in solitary confinement, he found solace in the birds that landed outside his cell window. For years he studied them, trained them and eventually wrote several books on their behavior. Remarkably, Stroud spent nearly 40 years in solitary before he died -- he never knew "alcatraz" means "pelican," or that early settlers called it "Bird Island."