LyingRobbing the PublickCheating OrphansPimpingPerjury
Explore a curated book list on society's darkest vices—lying, robbing the publick, cheating orphans, pimping, and perjury. Featuring essential works by Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Robert Bogdan on historical crimes, madness, and moral transgression.
Book
Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.
Book
The Trial of Gilles de Rais
by Georges Bataille
Written by France's famous connoisseur of transgression - the man the surrealist Andre Breton labelled an 'Excremental philosopher' - THE TRIALS OF GILLES DE RAIS is the best thing now available in English on one of the most bizarre figures in European history.' - New York Times Book Review'
Book
Freak Show
by Robert Bogdan
From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.
