Book Review: 'Whack Job' tells the story of a simple survival tool turned murder weapon

Book Review: ‘Whack Job’ tells the story of a simple survival tool turned murder weapon

From the murder of a Neanderthal-like man to the infamous Lizzie Borden, “Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder” provides a sarcastic, witty and quirky look at the history of a rather simple tool often found at the scene of…

Book Review: 'Whack Job' tells the story of a simple survival tool turned murder weapon

In “Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder,” Rachel McCarthy James set out to tell the story of the axe, and how a once simple tool became a murder weapon.

Axe Murder: A Brief History of a Grim Cultural Obsession

Early on in the process of writing my first book about axe murder, I took a job working in an after-school program. I was twenty-six and I’d recently figured out a new answer to the hundred-year-ol…

Rachel McCarthy James' book Whack Job traces the history of axe murder from prehistory to the present

While Lawrence writer Rachel McCarthy James co-wrote 2017’s true crime book—The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer, with her father, Bill James—her latest, Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder, is all her. It’s “the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout history,” and covers a dizzying swathe of history. Like a bloody version…