Bookplanet: the many ways to execute people

Process of Elimination
Review of EXECUTION: The Guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey, and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death by Geoffrey Abbott.
By NEIL GENZLINGER

WE are very sick puppies. “We” here meaning human beings, both individually and in cheering, bloodthirsty crowds.

Perhaps you already suspected this, but in “Execution” Geoffrey Abbott lops off any lingering doubts you might have had. By the end of his ghoulish tour of how people have been put to death over the centuries, the only remaining question is likely to be which puppies are sicker, the ones who have thought up the myriad methods that have been employed or the ones who have gathered round to watch the burnings, beheadings and disembowelments.

Abbott, the book jacket reports, “served for many years as a yeoman warder at the Tower of London.” What a yeoman warder does is not specified, but apparently it’s not much, because Abbott seems to have had an abundance of time to indulge his particular line of research: his previous books include “The Who’s Who of British Beheadings,” “Lords of the Scaffold: A History of the Executioner” and “Rack, Rope and Red-Hot Pincers: A History of Torture and Its Instruments.”

Here he takes an alphabetical approach, beginning with “Axe” and ending with “Twenty-Four Cuts”; combine this book with “The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers,” by Harold Schechter and David Everitt, and you’ve got the A B C’s as they might be taught at the Wes Craven Grammar School. Among the longest entries in Abbott’s book are the ones you might expect: B is for burned at the stake, E is for electric chair, F is for firing squad, G is for guillotine, H is for hanging.

The fun, though — and if you can’t bring a sense of black humor to this book, don’t buy it — is in the oddities. A chapter called “Cave of Roses” describes a technique used in Sweden “in which the victim was confined in a cave which was already occupied by numerous snakes and poisonous reptiles.” The cyphon method, used in ancient Greece, involved securing a naked victim under a hot sun and smearing him with milk and honey, then leaving him to the stinging insects. (“Should he, against all the odds, survive for 20 days,” Abbott adds, “he was taken down and, as a degradation, dressed in women’s clothes before being escorted by large crowds to the cliffs, over which he was thrown headfirst.”) The chapter titled “Sawn in Half” provides a useful discussion of whether the best approach is crossways, as in the magician’s trick, or head to foot, as employed by the Chinese.

Yet for all the practice we have had at executing people, we still can’t seem to get it right 100 percent of the time. Abbott’s book is full of flubbed killings: heads that took multiple whacks to remove, firing squads that missed the vital organs, electric chairs that didn’t deliver a big enough jolt. More dismaying, though, is that there are surprisingly few murderers and robbers in the volume — people who at least did something unequivocally wrong. Many more folks, it seems, were executed for religious or political beliefs. It’s as if those doing the executing knew subconsciously that ideas could not be killed and tried to compensate for that annoying truth by making their executions particularly gruesome.

Anyway, this all gets numbing fairly quickly. But, of course, only a psychotic or a book reviewer would ever read this volume from cover to cover. It’s meant to be taken in small bites, randomly; any more than that is just too disheartening.

(Neil Genzlinger is a staff editor at The NY Times.)