A Handbook on Hanging, by Charles Duff

[Trevor]

A Handbook on Hanging



Publication Date: October 31, 1999
Page: 240
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
Originally published by 1928 and revised and enlarged in 1934, 1938, 1948, 1954, 1955, and 1961.

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.