Pictures at an Execution

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 grim and seemingly endless 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. Her book, itself a murder mystery of sorts, circling suspensefully around a central point, is also a meditation on murder in a civilized society - what we make of it in law, morality, and art. Lesser narrates the trial with a sharp eye for detail and an absorbing sense of character. Questions that arise in the courtroom conjure other, broader ones why are we drawn to murder, as an act and as a spectacle? Who in a murder story are we drawn to - victim, murderer, detective? Is such interest, even pleasure, morally suspect? Lesser's reflections on these questions follow the culture in its danse macabre, from Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song to the Jacobean play The Changeling, fro