Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this book, Karen Halttunen wonders how people understand evil. Is evil the work of Satan or of nature? Is evil heritable? inevitable? eradicable? These are big questions, perhaps the biggest any historian, or even any philosopher, can ask. All too often, historians contemplating such weighty questions leave careful historical scholarship behind to wander into a world of woefully ahistorical moral speculation. Fortunately, Halttunen's assiduous, elegant study keeps well clear of that terrain. The result is both a deeply rewarding investigation of ideas about evil and, at the same time, a very fine read.

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The book examines how Americans across the centuries have reconciled themselves to a specific kind of evil, murder, by relying a particular means of reconciliation, reading. "Murder," Halttunen writes, "demands that a community come to terms with the crime—confront what has happened and endeavor to explain it, in an effort to restore order to the world. In literate societies, the cultural work of coming to terms with this violent transgression takes crucial form in the crafting and reading of written narratives of the murder, the chief purpose of which is to assign meaning to the incident" (pp. 1–2). Having established this neatly defined corpus of material—the murder narrative—as the object of her study, Halttunen traces the evolution of writing about murder from the seventeenth-century New England Puritan execution sermon to the nineteenth-century trial account. (An epilogue deals briefly with dominant late twentieth-century murder narratives: true-crime television and horror films.)

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