Harvard University Press - TRUE CRIME

American Homicide

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Randolph Roth
In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth examines the four factors that explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.
Hardcover October 2009

Death Investigation in America

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Jeffrey M. Jentzen
Why is the American system of death investigation so inconsistent and inadequate? In this unique political and cultural history, Jeffrey Jentzen draws on archives, interviews, and his own career as a medical examiner to look at the way that a long-standing professional and political rivalry controls public medical knowledge and public health.
Hardcover October 2009

Street Stories

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 EDT

Robert Jackall
Based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, this book examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth. In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.
Paperback May 2009