| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael A. Bellesiles, editor. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History. New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 453. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95.

The point of edited collections is to bring together related pieces that show something of what the editor wants the readers to see and to place like pieces together so that they gain from and add to one another. We care about the editor because we want to see what the editor deems of interest, something like going on a tour with an expert and seeing through the expert's eyes. Editor Michael A. Bellesiles is widely respected for his pioneering and eye-opening work on guns. We care about his selecting, assembling, and juxtaposing of the pieces because otherwise we would have to read each in a different journal, an unlikely event. 1

In this collection, Bellesiles brings together twenty new essays, his own introduction, and a picture for each essay, quite a cornucopia and a lot of book: 450 pages. Like most reviewers of such collections, I must either single out some exemplary essays, suggest which ones I think should have been excluded, say something about their almost inevitable uneven quality, or struggle to pretend that the pieces gel into a whole. . . .

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