The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights

The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights
Average customer rating:

Great Service Again

Madness and murder in San Francisco

Any California collection must have it.

I enjoyed the book

Not a good book!

The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights
Prentice Earl Sanders , and Bennett Cohen
Manufacturer: Arcade Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1559708069

Book Description

On the night of October 20, 1973, a white couple strolling down Telegraph Hill were set upon and butchered by four young black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The intent was nothing less than an attempt to instigate a race war. With pressure on the San Francisco Police Department mounting daily, and the murders showing no sign of abating, young homicide detectives Prentice Earl Sanders and his colleague Rotea Gilfordboth African-Americanwere assigned to the cases. The problem was: Sanders and Gilford were in the midst of a trail-blazing suit against the SFPD for racial discrimination, which in those days was rampant. The backlash was immediate. The force needed Sanderss and Gilfords knowledge of the black community to help stem the brutal murders, but the SFPD made it known that in a tight situation no white back-up would be forthcoming. In these impossible conditionsthe oppressive white power structure on the one hand, the violent black radicals on the otherSanders and Gilford knew they were sitting ducks. Still, they set out to find those guilty of the Zebra Murders and bring them to justice. This is their incredible story.

Customer Reviews:

Great Service Again.......2007-05-14

As usual book arrived in record time in great condition. Very interesting good read about a horrifying true subject!

Madness and murder in San Francisco.......2007-05-02

ZEBRA MURDERS: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights by Prentice Earl Sanders and Bennett Cohen is the true story of serial killings that took place in San Francisco in 1973 and 1974. The killings were racially motivated during a period when the United States was being forced to treat African Americans in a more equal manner. Although the Brown v. Board of Education decision had been made several years earlier, apartheid still existed. There were angry African Americans - some who were ready to step outside the law.

The atmosphere surrounding the murders included the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the birth of the Black Panther Party and continued segregation in the work place. Early in the police investigation, it was noted that all the victims were white and black men were seen running from the scene of the crime. Two police officers, Prentice Earl Sanders and Rotea Gilford, who were fighting their own racial discrimination battle with the San Francisco police department, were assigned to the case. All black men who were out after dark were stopped, searched and questioned. This behavior brought lawsuits to the city. In addition, the two black officers were concerned there was going to be a white backlash and so they pushed hard to solve the case, sometimes staying up for days on end. The killings were upsetting the entire city and Sanders and Gilford were afraid the 'racial profiling' was only serving to make matters worse.

This is a well-written true story of American apartheid in the San Francisco police department and the ability of two black officers to overcome the obstacles and still solve the mystery. It moves along swiftly while interjecting the needed nuggets of history of segregation and discrimination in the United States. You can feel the frustration Sanders and Gilford felt as they fought the police department in a lawsuit and attempted to solve the mystery of black men randomly killing white people. Enough background was given so that the atmosphere surrounding San Francisco in 1973 was apparent. It is definitely a must read book.

Reviewed by Alice Holman
of The RAWSISTAZ Reviewers

Any California collection must have it........2007-02-04

Any long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area will recall the Zebra killer, whose racially motivated drive-by shootings terrorized the city in 1973-74, and how they were eventually solved by a team led by two black detectives. This story comes alive under the hand of the city's first Afro-American police chief, who was one of these detectives, and pro ides behind-the-scenes expose information about the reign of terror and its investigation. The underlying politics and discrimination within the SFPD comes to life, as does the time of social turmoil, in this riveting story of a crime spree thwarted. Any California collection must have it.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I enjoyed the book.......2007-01-09

"Enjoy" is probably the wrong word for the subject matter. But I found it fascinating. Both my father and my uncle were in the force at the time and I heard stories about the case and the paranoia it caused. I was on offence about the racial controversies described in the book till I saw the discussions both on this site and elsewhere and saw the names of people (all retired SFPD cops) who were bashing the material. Now I think that maybe the authors are not exaggerating... Regardless, I found the book to be very interesting and informative. Good work.

Not a good book!.......2007-01-07

I bought this book with the hope of enhancing my limited knowledge on this critical time in the city of San Fransico that took place back in the 1970's. I did read Clark Howards book on the same subject about 25 years ago. After reading Mr Sanders version of the events I wonder if they were both writing about the same incident. Needless to say, Mr. Sanders book leaves one with the feeling that the real crime was the fact that the Mayor of S.F. and the police were using every means at there disposal to put a stop to these horrible crimes.
One fact that seems to be at odds with Mr. Sanders is the fact that after months of frustration, the police were able to create a crack in the case within a week of finally taking drastic actions in regards to a dragnet in the area where most of the killings took place. This is in direct contrast to the point that Mr. Sanders makes throughout the book which is to say that the then S.F. police department was completely corrupt and unable to solve crimes because they were so at odds with most of the citizens of S.F. A point most everyone else disputes.
I believe the fact that the crime was solved only after the police applied direct pressure speaks for itself in terms of whatit really took to put a stop to these killers.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who is searching for a truthful, insighful and accurate telling of this tragic chapter in the city by the bay.

The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement

Average customer rating:

Brilliant, demolishes homosexuality as mental illness
A Totally Surprising and Amazing Book
Mental Illness: A Study in Scapegoating.
brilliant humanist writer
'mentally ill' is often another term for 'not like us'

The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement
Thomas Stephen Szasz
Manufacturer: Syracuse University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (Revised Edition)
Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences
The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing As Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression
Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man
Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics

ASIN: 0815604610

Customer Reviews:

Brilliant, demolishes homosexuality as mental illness .......2005-06-18

One particular chapter -- "The Product Conversion" -- does a brilliant job of demolishing the theory that homosexuality is a mental illness. It dissects every argument made to this effect, and shows that homosexuality is nothing more than a variant of human sexuality, in much the same way that being left-handed is nothing more than a variant of laterality. Szasz does a brilliant job of showing the hypocrisy of the medico-legal establishment in terms of that establishment (1) declaring that homosexuality is a mental illness (this is no longer the official position of the American Psychological or American Psychiatric Associations) while (2) declaring that homosexuality is a crime. It cannot be both, as Szasz points out in his analysis -- while criminals can be mentally ill, homosexual status as opposed to conduct cannot be both criminal **and** a mental illness. The book is worth purchasing for this chapter alone, and I recommend it to any person interested in beating back efforts to remedicalize and recrimenalize the status of gay people. This chapter also reveals the manner in which religious ideology masquerades as psychiatric doctrine, ruthlessly exposing the epistemological error made by those who cling to outdated and cruel theories in this regard.

Philip Chandler

A Totally Surprising and Amazing Book.......2004-07-06

I first came across this book about 15 years ago while going through some stacks in the library of a community college in San Bruno CA. What stunned me at first was the equation of modern psychiatry being the child (i.e. direct decendant) of the Inquisition. I made a copy of the book but misplaced it. Even so, I thought about the little bit I read of it for years. It never left my mind.

Then the issue of manufacturing a person's madness came intimately into my life during the past two years or so. I found a used copy (maybe Amazon.com) and read it within the past three months. This book literally armed me with arguments that permitted me to persuade others--those holding the keys of bondage--that their system was flawed, and it resulted in the release of a person from incarceration in a mental institution. Since that time this person has been seen by a number of mental health professionals none of which attach a mental diagnosis to him.

I think the true value of this book to me is the psychoanalytic quality of the writing and its systematic approach. I would see it as being very hard to find Szasz's arguments as flawed, although I can see how some aspects of his thought maybe viewed as being exaggerated. Still, sometimes we all have to exaggerate a problem in order to expand it be able to sufficiently see what is actually going on. I think he does this eloquently and elegantly.

There were times when I was reading the book when I thought I might not get any more out of it, and I was tempted to set it aside, and I am so glad that I didn't. I feel now that this text was a very personal thing to him, and it comes out in the end, although it might not be completely evident.

I got a great deal out of reading this book. I would recommend it to anybody whose life has been affected by fear, doubt, superstition, dogmatic therapists, etc. Just knowing how the system is set up institutionally can assist one in making better choices and articulating your views, particularly when they are based on sensitive feelings.

Many mental health professionals like to come across at times as being god-like, but those who do come across this way are often insecure and exploit others to hide their own deficiencies. This book truly helps in being able to uncover that deception in a way that you can go nose to nose with the inquisitors of this generation who can be very dangerous and who can create a tremendous amount of damage.

It is scary, but it is far more scary without the knowledge Szasz has so generoously provided us, and which is made even more poignant given the persecutions he received from others within his own field.

Mental Illness: A Study in Scapegoating........2004-02-19

_The Manufacture of Madness_ by right wing libertarian "anti-psychiatrist" Thomas Szasz is a comparative essay showing the similarity and growth of the "religion of mental illness" from the Inquisition, the persecution of heretics, and the days of witch hunting. Szasz contends that the idea of "mental illness" is in fact a category mistake involving a false notion of "illness". Much of this book is spent demonstrating how society in the form of the "mental health movement" seeks to root out dissenters and heretics in order to protect the reigning order (or to achieve a new scientistic based order controlled by doctor-bureaucrats - the modern day utopia of "the Brave New World"). Szasz finds notable similarity between the mental health movement and the Inquisition and persecution of witches (including the comparison made between the _DSM_ and the notorious witch hunter's manual _Malleus Maleficarum_). Szasz observes that society has always had certain individuals who defied convention and thus posed a threat to the reigning order. These individuals (mostly eccentrics, romantics, dreamers, dissidents, and heretics) were often rounded up by society's "protectors" and then identified as the "inner enemy" and thus conveniently "scapegoated". Tradition held that the scapegoat served as the embodiment for all of the sins within the given enclosed society. Thus, for Szasz, the so-called mentally ill individual is identified as an eccentric by the modern day "therapeutic state" and deemed to serve as the scapegoat for the sins of a given society through the process of forced confinement. Those who fall too far to the right or left of the bell curve are arbitrarily deemed "abnormal" after some cutoff point and therefore forcibly confined, their civil liberties denied to them. Often such an individual is a poor man or woman who is eccentric and lives alone. Such a person makes an easy target for the statist "thought police" of the world of 1984. Despite their denials of their illness, such individuals are arbitrarily declared ill and confined. Nearly all categories within the _DSM_ have clear reference to class, race, and sex biases. Nearly all categories can serve conveniently as a tool of the wealthy and dominant elite against the impoverished classes. While society may deny civil liberties to certain individuals, the real problem is that it has failed to provide a way to fully integrate such eccentric individuals into its dominant structures. Thus, Szasz seeks to re-politicize a process that is often entirely de-politicized and defined in terms of illness. The first half of this book offers a comparative survey of mental illness and the mental health movement and the persecution of witches and heretics. One may consult the works particularly of Norman Cohn, a historian who deals with the medieval period and some of the mass hysteria that existed at that time, for a detailed examination of this topic within Europe particularly. However, Szasz fails to mention that the notion of madness predates the medieval period going back as far as Biblical times and being discussed by such illustrious Greeks as Aristotle and Socrates in terms of ethics. The second half of the book deals with the manufacture of madness by what amounts to "mad doctors". Here, the great American doctor and an important framer of the Constitution, Benjamin Rush is discussed. Rush often viewed political conflicts in terms of illness, proving for Szasz that the notion of illness has been repeatedly abused so as to further a political agenda. Rush's advocation of "cures" for individuals deemed to be "mentally ill" often amount to barbarous cruelty. Psychiatry has a long, bloody, and inglorious history involving forced medication and confinement, as well as electroshock and insulin shock therapies, and "insane" psycho-surgeries, as well as a thousand other tortures. Szasz also discusses the notions of heresy, medical stigma and scapegoating, as well as two of the more notorious deviancies which psychiatry originally sought after: masturbation and homosexuality. The ridiculousness and obsession of psychiatry with these sorts of disorders which would otherwise be deemed as sinful, demonstrates the absurd lengths to which many doctors would go (supported by Freudian theory) to legitimize their practice. For example, consider this ironically crude remark made by German physician, Werner Villinger, in the 1920s, which speaks of masturbation as "a snake which has to be throttled". Such outbreaks of hysteria and "masturbatory insanity" were common during this era. Szasz would argue for example that the removal of both masturbation and homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the _DSM_ proves that these so called "illnesses" are nothing more than social constructs reflecting the dominant morality of the era. While I agree with Szasz on many points he makes here, I disagree with him to a certain extent. The fact is that certain individuals pose a threat to the dominant order, either as criminals or as causing a great deal of dissent. Also, unlike Szasz I believe that religion and the church serve a useful purpose in society and disagree violently with his secular humanistic stance and rejection of God. The question remains however who should the notion of "mental illness" serve principally. Should it serve the patient, should it serve the family, or should it serve society at large (which is increasingly coming to resemble a scientistic dystopia)? In a traditionalist based society, for example, the so called "mentally ill" would be regarded as seers, prophets, or magicians and treated with reverence. In today's world they are often treated maliciously. Mental illness often amounts to nothing more than what traditionally was known as eccentricity, magic, religious experience, mysticism, the experience of being truly "awake", and other unusual experiences. These experiences should not be declared abnormal or somehow outside the human condition by a scientistic and materialist based culture.

brilliant humanist writer.......2003-02-01

a penetrating and enlightening analysis of things that make men crazy, namely power and control.

Thomas Szasz is a real hero of consciousness, freedom and intelligence who is never afraid to disclose the information that hurts the orthodoxy where it counts.

This work, like so many of his others, is a shining example of the great American libertarian vanguard.

Enjoy.

'mentally ill' is often another term for 'not like us'.......2002-04-04

although thomas szasz was wrong to say that mental illness is totally a myth and that there is no reason to believe that there are people with mental disorders as debilitating as physical disorders, he certainly was right in attacking the mental health system for its often dehumanizing effects on people who simply have not been 'encultured' enough for the comfort of those around them. some of his work can be dismissed as dated anti psychiatry extremism, but some of it is absolutely relevant and as important today as it was when published

Average customer rating:

Sad demise of a good writer
Tough Guy
Disappointing
Got to be a diehard Crumley fan for this one
Quite a tale - but not for the sqeamish.

The Right Madness
James Crumley
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Final Country
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ASIN: 0670034061
Release Date: 2005-05-09

Amazon.com

"This is not my kind of job, man," Montana private eye C.W. Sughrue insists when his psychiatrist pal, Dr. William "Mac" MacKinderick, asks him to find out who surreptitiously duplicated minidisks containing his conversations with seven long-term analysis patients. But, as we soon discover in James Crumley's The Right Madness, this is precisely the sort of investigation toward which C.W. (for Chauncey Wayne) gravitates--filled with violence, sex, despair, and victims at a dime a dozen, not to mention enough booze and illegal drugs to floor a full-grown rhino.

Life hasn't treated Sughrue kindly over the years. Introduced in The Last Good Kiss (1978), this now late-middle-aged, Texas-born redneck and Vietnam vet was left for dead at the end of the Hammett Award-winning The Mexican Tree Duck (1993), and he almost bit it on several more occasions in the revenge fantasy Bordersnakes (1996). As Madness opens, C.W.'s younger lawyer wife, Whitney, has taken new employment in Minneapolis, and he's in serious denial about the consequences of this separation on their marriage. Instead, Sughrue loses himself in MacKinderick's supposedly "easy job"--witnessing a series of gruesome deaths (including the botched hanging of a professor's spouse and an artist's fatal tumble), chasing across the highway-striped West in search of some missing forensic evidence, being physically violated by a "blond giantess from Ukraine," and endeavoring to protect his client's redheaded wife from a couple of licentious FBI agents and her own self-destructive habits. Along the way, MacKinderick's blood-soaked sports car is found on a Washington state Indian reservation, and the doctor is presumed dead. But that only drives Sughrue on harder, as he tries, with help from seductive Butte attorney Claudia Lucchesi, to determine how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together. He's barely more successful at that task than readers will be. But then, Crumley's detective stories have always been stronger on character development, high-caliber action, literary wit, and lyrical exposition than on meticulous plot construction. If you've ever wondered how Hunter S. Thompson might have rewritten Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, The Right Madness provides more than a few clues. Watch out: bad craziness ahead. --J. Kingston Pierce

Book Description

James Crumley is one of the most influential crime writers of the post-Chandler era, and his raw, subversive novels have earned him living legend status. He first introduced readers to C. W. Sughrue (“`Shoog' as in sugar. And `rue' as in rue the goddamned day”) in his now classic The Last Good Kiss. An ex-army officer turned Montana private eye, Sughrue is as tough and cynical as he is good-hearted and weak-kneed when it comes to women and booze. He's back to take readers on a bender through small towns, dark bars, and dank hotel rooms in a novel charged with Crumley's genius for the poetry of violence.

In The Right Madness, Sughrue's close friend, psychiatrist Will MacKinderick, begs him to track down stolen confidential psychoanalysis files—he suspects one of his patients is the culprit. Going against every last instinct, Sughrue agrees to take on the case—a $20,000 retainer is always hard to resist. And when the suspects start dying of violently unnatural causes, Sughrue—fueled by alcohol, drugs, and lurid sexual entanglements—finds himself struggling to stay ahead of the madness unfolding around him.

Before Pelecanos, Connelly, and Lehane, there was Crumley and, with The Right Madness, he shows us once again how he put the “hard” in “hard-boiled.”

Customer Reviews:

Sad demise of a good writer.......2007-08-16

What the hell happened to James Crumley? Too much of the booze and drugs he writes about ad nauseum in this randomly plotted, sloppily written, seemingly un-edited mish-mash of a novel? Crumley can't even complete a simile with any coherence in this mess. Read The Last Good Kiss and remember Crumley as he once was. This is just sad.

Tough Guy.......2007-03-16

I do like Crumley's "tough guys" and Sughrue is as tough as they come. But I find many of Crumley's sentences so convoluted I have no idea what they mean. Like many "tough guy" writers, he sometimes uses a specialized vocabulary that, apparently, is known to tough guys (although not always to me). This is fine with me and rather adds to the charm of the "tough guy" genre. However, when used in conjunction with bad grammatical structure, I sometimes spend several minutes trying to decipher his meaning. Then I give up, feeling I have missed something important.

Disappointing.......2006-05-24

I read Crumley's "The Last Good Kiss," and that may have been his last good book. Anybody else may have gotten at least 3 stars but I think Crumley's gotten lazy. Any time Sughrue gets into a fix, he's always able to kick ass and fight his way out. Of course, any 70 year old Korean war vet should be able to take out a 30 year old FBI agent in top shape....sure. Believable. Hey, Crumley. This is supposed to be crime fiction, not fantasy.

The author also seems to have a voyeuristic fascination with young women and drugs, in no particular order.

Sex and drugs were used to good effect in "Kiss." Here, they're just cheap devices to spice up a basically very boring plot.

So much more could have been done with the illegal immigrant/white slavery/child abuse story, but that was never explored. Just good ol' Sughrue kickin' ass.....zzzzzzz.

Got to be a diehard Crumley fan for this one.......2006-02-27

If you've never read Crumley, read his earlier work in "Dancing Bear" or "The Wrong Case" before this one. They have the same sensibility and feel, but the stories are tighter and the books just work better.

Yes, this book is better written than a lot of hackwork you'll find out there in the crime and mystery genre, but after reading other stuff he's written I guess I'm holding him to a higher standard.

Quite a tale - but not for the sqeamish........2006-01-12

After reading the mainstream reviews of this book, I had planned to pass on it but a friend, whose taste in mysteries is trustworthy, recommended it. I usually prefer books with a protagonist who is at least a little likable, or engaging, or I can empathize with. Crumley's protagonist in this story, C.W. Sughrue, is not even remotely endearing. He is, to varying degrees, obnoxious, crude, irritating and misanthropic. He starts out abusing alcohol, and deteriorates to using various other drugs, including crack. Fairly early in the book, I thought, "Who cares about this nutcase!? Why finish it?"

Well, Sughrue is also brilliant and the plot eventually becomes fascinating. It is, to varying degrees, bizarre, confusing, irritating, fantastical, improbable and - finally - impossible. About half way through the book the story becomes so outlandish that it is more like a comic book than a regular mystery novel. I suspect everyone who sticks with the book will have their own breaking point, at which the story enters a new, fantastical zone. For me, it occurred when a certain character mutilated herself in a certain incredibly gory manner, and I'll leave the details to the reader to discover, if you're interested.

To stick with this book requires a very high tolerance for non-sequiturs, red herrings, shocking turns of events, and generally low-life behaviors by most of the characters, especially Sughrue. It also requires, eventually, almost total suspension of belief . On the other hand, the reader who hangs in there will become increasingly curious about how the heck Crumley will tie all the bizarre and apparently unconnected loose ends together. He doesn't totally succeed, but the series of events at the end reward the reader with a fantastic finish.

I suspect that Crumley set out to define a maximally non-engaging, possibly even repulsive, protagonist, and then to write such a brilliant and engaging plot that the reader feels compelled to keep going, in spite of Sughrue. I know that I came to really not care what happened to Sughrue, whether he was facing what appears to be certain death or even when he managed to get himself raped by a gorgeous, but of course deranged, woman. Crumley's motives for making Sughrue so disgusting are known only to him, but the final outcome is worth it for the readers who can hang in there until the end.

Circles of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo/Circulos De Locura : Madres De LA Plaza Dy Mayo

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heartwrenching and enlightening

Circles of Madness: Mothers of the Plaza De Mayo/Circulos De Locura : Madres De LA Plaza Dy Mayo
Marjorie Agosin
Manufacturer: White Pine Press (NY)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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poetry, US/Chilean, tr C Kostopulos-Cooperman

Customer Reviews:

heartwrenching and enlightening.......1998-05-15

This is a touching collection of poems that will teach and horrify the reader. I recommend it to anyone with a desire to see what happens when human rights violations are considered the "norm."

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Right Madness on Skye
Richard Hugo
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Ltd
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Binding: Hardcover

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Inequity and Madness: Psychosocial and Human Rights Issues

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Inequity and Madness: Psychosocial and Human Rights Issues
José Guimón
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0306466740

Book Description

The two most important notions concerning the rights of people with mental illnesses are among the most neglected: the first is that human rights and duties are complementary and that both must be considered in constructing a framework for mental health care. The second is that we must strive for equity in developing mental health programs.
Inequity and Madness: Psychosocial and Human Rights Issues addresses both these notions. It provides the background and the facts about fulfilment of needs and the protection of human rights of people with mental illnesses. The wealth of information that it provides and the clarity of its presentation make it a document of immediate practical usefulness to all those trying to help people with mental illnesses and those who look after them. At the same time, however, the sincerity and vigour of its text make it clear that this book is a personal statement of commitment to the achievement of equity for all people, with or without mental illnesses.
"I hope that Inequity and Madness will be widely read and share the hope - which was clearly on Professor Guimón's mind when he undertook to produce this volume - that this book will contribute to improving the quality of life of those with mental illnesses and those who help them to live through times of devastating diseases and misery that is often an unnecessary consequence."
Professor Norman Sartorius - From the Foreword.

Madness in the Multitude: Human Security and World Disorder

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Madness in the Multitude: Human Security and World Disorder
Fen Olser Hampson , Jean Daudelin , John B. Hay , Holly Reid , and Todd Marting
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Going Global: Transforming Relief and Development Ngos

ASIN: 0195415248

Book Description

Madness in the Multitude explores the nature of human security in the contemporary world. At one level, human security is about "freedom from fear" and alleviating the plight of innocent victims of armed conflict. Civil strife in many corners of the globe--East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Georgia, Tajikistan--have witnessed extraordinary violence directed at civilians, especially the most vulnerable citizens in society such as women and children. International efforts to curb the production and use of anti-personnel landmines, half the proliferation and spread of small arms, and strengthen international prohibitions against the most egregious violations of human rights through the establishment of an International Criminal Court are directed at augmenting human security. But at another level, the concept of human security addresses a much wider set of concerns. There are those who argue that human security is not just about "freedom from fear" but also "freedom from want" and other kinds of deprivation. These advocates point to the adverse affects of globalization on human development and the problems of achieving social justice in a world where the forces of globalization have unequal impacts on the distribution of wealth and income. According to this view, the widening gap between the world's richest and poorest countries is a major cause for concern as are a wide range of nonmilitary threats to human health and survival such as AIDS, water and air-borne pollutants, and the general deterioration of the biosphere. In a wide-ranging theoretical and empirical analysis, Madness in the Multitude examines the different meanings and understanding of the concept of human security and how the concept of human security has evolved over the past two centuries. Through case studies of the International Criminal Court, the Anti-personnel Landmines Treaty, international efforts to control small arms, military intervention in Kosovo and elsewhere, and the work of international development agencies and lending institutions, this book asks whether there is a new human security "paradigm" of international politics and what the implications of this paradigm for international order are. The volume suggests that human security constitutes a new kind of global public good whose provision challenges our traditional conceptions about the purpose and function of international institutions, the role of civil society, and the nature of power in international politics. This book explores how our conceptions of human security have evolved in the latter half of the twentieth century, analyzing the debate about how best to promote and advance human security.

Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology

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Required Reading for anyone curious about group mentality.
DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE TITLE

Path to Collective Madness: A Study in Social Order and Political Pathology
Dipak K. Gupta
Manufacturer: Praeger Paperback
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0275972216

Book Description

Why did the Rwandan genocide take place? How could parents feed their own children drinks laced with poison in Jonestown? As we see many parts of the world being engulfed in fratricidal frenzy, we wonder if it can happen in this country. Gupta examines contemporary cases of genocide and mass murder and seeks to explain why certain societies are more prone to these actions and others relatively immune. Gupta sees a dialectical tension between our two identities: the self and the collective. The end of the medieval period was marked by the emergence of individualism in Europe. With time, the march of individualism engulfed the entire Western world and permeated every aspect of its culture, tradition, and academic paradigm. Neoclassical economics is the embodiment of this single-minded pursuit of the rationality of individualism. However, our psychobiological evolution has also imbued us with the irrepressible desire to form groups and to act upon its welfare. The reason for this eternal conflict lies in our own struggle with our two identities. When the pendulum swings to the extreme end of collectivism, genocide and other forms of social abnormalities--collective madness--occur. When we move too far into individualism, people tend to seek something greater beyond selfish pursuits. Through his panoramic view, Gupta provides an explanation for both social order and political pathology that will be of interest to students, scholars, and other researchers involved with ethnic conflict, collective behavior, and conflict resolution.

Customer Reviews:

Required Reading for anyone curious about group mentality........2004-06-24

I am a former student of Dr Gupta (summer 2003) and I think that this is an excellent book. If you want all the details of human psychology, or if you just want to read the case studies or BOTH you can easily do so because the text is well partitioned. This book elegently explains human group behavior to any reader. Dr Gupta's insights are startling, and between reading his book and attending his class he has given me a much greater understanding of why people do the things they do.

DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE TITLE.......2002-01-22

AS A FORMER STUDENT OF DR. GUPTA'S (SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY- 1979), HE TAKES SOME OF THE MOST DIFFICULT SUBJECTS AND BENDS OVER BACKWARDS TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND. HE HAS ONCE AGAIN DONE SO WITH PATHS TO COLLECTIVE MADNESS. WANT TO KNOW WHY PEOPLE DO THE THINGS THEY DO- HE WILL TELL YOU. HIS EXAMPLES APPLY TO ANY GROUP OR TRIBE. EVERYONE WANTS TO BE PART OF SOMETHING, NOW YOU CAN BE PART OF DR. GUPTA'S INNER READING CIRCLE. PUT ANY GROUP OF PEOPLE TOGETHER AND THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A BIT OF "COLLECTIVE MADNESS."

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Right Madness

Manufacturer: HARPER COLLINS 0 PUB
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000GYNEXU

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THE RIGHT MADNESS OF SKY
Richard Hugo
Manufacturer: Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000UUQYGO

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