Synopses & Reviews
Review
What's most engaging about Pictures at an Execution is the way in which Lesser's intense involvement with her subject is mediated by a cool rationality that militates against sentimentality, cant, and disingenuousness. It's bracing to watch an active moral intelligence at work, ready to question anything, including the writer's own motives...We can read the book with pleasure, interest, and admiration. Douglas Dennis - Angolite
Review
What's most engaging about Pictures at an Executionis the way in which Lesser's intense involvement with her subject is mediated by a cool rationality that militates against sentimentality, cant, and disingenuousness. It's bracing to watch an active moral intelligence at work, ready to question anything, including the writer's own motives...We can read the book with pleasure, interest, and admiration.
Review
Lesser's mesmerizing study about the spectatorship of murder...demonstrates why a televised execution cannot succeed as either deterrent or moral instruction. A significant addition to the literature of capital punishment. Robert Taylor
Review
Erudite but sensible culture crit. Boston Globe
Review
Unusually compelling reading, for the book suggests that the persistent interest in murder is in fact one of the threads of our common humanity, a prospect we can hardly entertain with complacency. Why murder should draw us is the question Lesser explores through a multiplicity of lenses in a sensitive and intelligent manner, abjuring sensationalism. This is a provocative, well-conceived, and well-written book. New Statesman and Society
Review
Her style is not dense but enviable, a joy to read, like listening to an old friend. James P. Hammersmith - Southern Humanities Review
Review
Erudite but sensible culture crit. --Boston Globe
Synopsis
This book is about murder--in life and in art--and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the center of Wendy Lesser's investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Our fascination with murder gets its day in court as Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture.
About the Author
Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review.