The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Crime

A Photographic History

By Colin Wilson

2002

First Published

4.20

Average Rating

512

Number of Pages

15H37M

Audio Length

Charles Manson, Bonnie and Clyde, O. J. Simpson, Serpico, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh, John Christie, Lorena Bobbit, Ruth Ellis, the Gang of Four, the Great Train Robbery, and the Hitler diaries—these are only thirteen of the many and manifold cases featured in this new, copiously illustrated Mammoth volume drawn from the annals of twentieth-century crime. Researched by editor Colin Wilson, an authority on crime and the criminal mind, and with access to the extensive resources of the international photo collection at the Hulton Getty Picture Library, the book offers more than 500 pages of unforgettable, and sometimes rare, images that cover a widely diverse range of subjects, from art theft to arson, from con men to cannibalism, from forensics to executions, from censorship to terrorists. As comprehensive in its scope as it is shocking in its photographic details, this illustrated chronicle brings dramatic immediacy to some of the most notorious events of the last century. One photo presents serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot's stash of his forty-seven victims' clothes. Another image captures the attempted assassination of President Reagan, his Secret Service agents diving to protect him, while still another illustrates the heavy hand of justice with a body reeling from the bullets of the firing squad. Here, too, are photographs of victims, vital clues, grisly crime scenes, mass murders, sex scandals, gangsters, spies, and innumerable other subjects that arrest the eye and graphically illuminate the consequences of crime.

Avg Rating

4.20

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

48%

4 STARS

29%

3 STARS

17%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Colin Wilson

Author · 115 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized. Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.