Killing

Misadventures In Violence

Jeff Sparrow
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Killing

Published

1 July 2009

ISBN

9780522856347

Pages

288

Imprint

Melbourne University Press

Killing

Misadventures In Violence

Jeff Sparrow

How hard is it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abattoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?

Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning ANZAC. The macabre discovery sets Jeff Sparrow on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How do ordinary people—whether in today's wars or in 1915—learn to take a human life? How do they live with the aftermath?

These questions lead Sparrow through history and across Australia and the USA, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and writers about one of the last remaining taboos. Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, meditating on what violence means, not just for perpetrators, but for all of us.

How hard is it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abattoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?

Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning ANZAC. The macabre discovery sets Jeff Sparrow on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How do ordinary people—whether in today's wars or in 1915—learn to take a human life? How do they live with the aftermath?

These questions lead Sparrow through history and across Australia and the USA, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and writers about one of the last remaining taboos. Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, meditating on what violence means, not just for perpetrators, but for all of us.

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is the former editor of Overland literary journal, and works at Victoria University. He is the co-author, with sister Jill, of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the author of Communism: A Love Story (shortlisted for the Colin Roderick Award) and Killing: Misadventures in Violence (a finalist in the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award 2009).

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Paperback
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Other formats available