Author Description

This striking and original book is an attempt to describe the true and false cultures of mass death in this century. On the battlefields of the World Wars, in the death camps, in Korea and Vietnam and in all the smaller wars, pogroms, organized famines, and other disasters, some 110,000,000 have died - a nation of the dead. This is a conservative estimate; we hardly know how to count the dead. But Mr. Elliot has begun to find accurate methods and, more important, to discover ways of individualizing the figures - to analyse the ways in which men die, to see the ordeal through the eyes of the victims. Apart from engaging our sympathies, Elliot brings together for the first time the historical dimensions of the problem and historical and philosophical perspectives on it. Lest we forget, or, worse, ignore.