From Library Journal
This fascinating book should appeal to general readers interested in popular culture, art, and literature. Gerould, a professor of theater and comparative literature, focuses on the guillotine as a cultural artifact, examining its representation in Western art, literature, films, cartoons, and even toys from the revolutionary period to the present. He traces its origin and history, underscoring the ironies of its invention as a quick, simple, humane, and "democratic" instrument of death. Lavishly illustrated, the text includes such bizarre material as stories of animals executed by guillotine and accounts of scientific and medical curiosity about the pain experienced by a decapitated body. Little-known details like Nazi use of the guillotine will remind readers that earlier generations were as haunted by memories of the guillotine as we are by the Holocaust.
- Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Publishers Weekly
Gerould presents 200 years of the most famous executioner's tool, the guillotine, from details of its use to its appearance in literature, the visual arts and music. His historical account ranges from the guillotine's invention in the early 1790s as a means of making capital punishment more humane--through instantaneous deathp. 13 --to its notoriety as the great symbol of France's Reign of Terror. Gerould offers reports of post-Terror balls for relatives of the guillotined and 19th-century medical experiments p. 56 to discover if consciousness remains after the head is severed. Short chapters trace guillotine themes in Hugo and Dickens, Berlioz and the performances of '70s rock icon Alice Cooper, and others. He also presents tidbits about the cult of personality surrounding France's state executioners and about underpublicized use of the guillotine by the Nazis. Though Gerould (who edited American Melodrama ) never quite gets around to his promised cultural interpretation of the guillotine's role in Western imagination, this book will find an audience among those fascinated by a device that has come to represent so much about modern revolution, human rights and terror. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.