Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry...

40 years ago, five youths on a weekend getaway in the Texas countryside fell prey to a butcher in a mask made of human skin and his cannibalistic family, and horror cinema would never be the same. Violent, confrontational, and shockingly realistic, director Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE terrified audiences in a way never thought possible when it was unleashed on a politically and socially tumultuous America in 1974.

Uncovers the use of torture by the West while they categorically deny it, revealing a picture that challenges the complacency on human rights and exposes their lies.

Shows us how when one of us tortures, we are all implicated in the crime. These three sharp essays by former attorney general Ramsey Clark, Iraqi dissident Haifa Zangana, and professor of sociology Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, expose how psychologically insidious torture practices are, how deep a mark they leave, and how necessary it is for us as a society to hold torturers accountable. From publisher description.

"I'm thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It's always there. Always. Jake once said, 'Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.' And here's what I'm thinking: I don't want to be here." In this novel, a man and his girlfriend are on their way to a secluded farm. When the two take an unexpected detour,...

"The question of when, and under what circumstances, the practice of torture might be justified has received a great deal of attention in the last decade in both academia and in the popular media. Many of these discussions are, however, one-sided with other perspectives either ignored or quickly dismissed with minimal argument. In On the Ethics of Torture, Uwe Steinhoff provides a complete account of the philosophical debate surrounding this highly...

In this extraordinary work of cultural and intellectual history, Hunt grounds the creation of human rights in the changes that authors brought to literature, the rejection of torture as a means of finding out truth and the spread of empathy.

The Torture Papers consists of the "torture memos" and reports written by U.S. government officials to prepare the way for and to legitimize coercive interrogation and torture in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib. This volume of documents presents for the first time a compilation of materials that prior to publication have existed only piecemeal in the public domain. The Bush Administration, concerned about the legality of harsh interrogation...

"The pilgrims and merchants who first came to America from Europe professed an intention to create a society free of the barbarism of Old World tyranny and New World savagery. But over the centuries Americans have turned to torture during moments of crisis at home and abroad and have debated its legitimacy in defense of law and order. From the Indian wars to Civil War POW prisons and early penitentiaries, from "the third degree" in police stations...

A scarred Brooklyn resident remembers his past life as a Haitian torturer in the 1960s, a period during which he waged personal and political battles before moving to New York, where his past continues to haunt him.