The Parallax View

Two remarkable stories were reported in the media in 2003. A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Buñuel and Dalí, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencˇicˇ (a Slovene family name!),

Aztec Blood

Never less than spellbinding, this golden tale is third in a series (after Aztec Autumn) and follows the exploits of a mestizo boy (half Aztec, half Spanish) in 16th-century New Spain, struggling for survival against Spanish nobles in league with the Inquisition. Cristo the Bastardo spins his tale from a dungeon prison between bouts of torture before his hanging. Raised among the legions of social outcast l‚peros, half-breed beggars hated by Indians and Spanish alike, Cristo is protected and illegally educated by Fray Antonio, a defrocked priest.

Torture and Democracy

This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world’s leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe.