Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History

"When one man dies it's a tragedy. When thousands die it's a statistic."
-Josef Stalin to Winston Churchill

                We live in the most peaceful time ever in human history. Well, so says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard. This might sound bizarre considering the atrocities taking place in Darfur, Syria and Afghanistan to name a few, but he's technically right - the data shows that people are becoming less violent - and data is what we're interested in. Not emotions, or sensitivities, or theories but numbers and facts. This is a hard concept to accept! Even with all the horrors happening in the world today, not to mention war after war in the 20th century, this is the least violent mankind has ever been? How much more horrible could it have been before the modern age?

                Turns out it's far nastier then you might think!
                Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History, is a testament to man's inhumanity to man on paper - a codified list of the worst moments of our species through time and culture, composed and compiled by atrocitologist, Matthew White. Wait, what's an atrocitologist? That's a scholar of atrocitology of course! (What a ridiculous question to ask!) In this book you'll find the statistics for 100 violent events, corresponding to "the largest man-made death tolls, regardless of who was involved or why they did it." (Sorry plague you don't qualify.) This rationale means any time from history is fair game, although the earliest Mr. White goes back is to the Second Persian War with a relatively meager 300,000 dead. Meager in comparison to one of history's all time nastiest guys, the Turkic conqueror Timur the Lame and the 15,000,000 deaths attributed to him.
               Each of the events are supported with extensive historical research, statistics,  background stories, and humor. I am a tremendous fan of injecting humor into history whenever possible (re: that podcast thing I do), and Mr. White actually made me chuckle out loud a few times. Then I flipped to the front of the book and reminded myself I was learning about bad things from history. He commends the Ming Dynasty for supplying old slapstick movies with a source of breakable vases and introduces Chinggis Khan with - "he couldn't have been this destructive, could he?" This is a difficult move to make in a book dedicated to humanity's evils, but it is pulled off deftly and appropriately.          

The data shows that bad guys have a 60% chance of escaping justice.
Where the heck is Batman when you need him?

But then there is the question of how Mr. White arrives at of his statistics. For much of the ancient history topics, there is considerable academic estimation. After all, Herodotus reports the Persians fielded some near 3 million soldiers. This...isn't even close to accurate. So Mr. White goes through the histories and arrives at a more suitable answer. As for the modern events which offer more data  there is another snag...why would a dictator keep accurate numbers of how many they killed? Take the example of  Josef Stalin. Soviet records seem to indicate some 3 million died in the labor camps, but that's not including those who died of famine, disease, The Great Purge and other nasty, horrible things. Some historians claim Stalin was ultimately responsible for 50 million deaths, others think it was lower - 20 million. Mr. White agrees with that lower estimate of 20 million, citing a 1937 Soviet census that couldn't account for nearly 16.7 million people...curious and shocking. There is data behind the book's final estimate, but also a historian's keen judgment.
                At 688 pages this is no light reading, yet the narration is so conversational, so filled with amusing anecdotes and fascinating trivia that it's easy to lose yourself in the chapters. The study of atrocitology might be grim work, but there is no better scholar for it then Mr. White. He's a numbers guy, but there is an undeniable humanist element to his work. The study of atrocities, ultimately, is a quest to understand why these things happened so they can be prevented from happening again. Those looking for an insightful and honest account of these stories will do no better then to pick up this excellent book.

Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History
Matthew White; W.W. Norton & Company; May 13, 2013; 688pgs. 
Purchase it now from Amazon.com or wherever books are sold.