The Expectations of Murderers. Essays on the History of Crime.
Sandmo, Erling: Morderens forventninger. Kriminalitetshistoriske essay"History is what hurts.” This quote sets the tone for Erling Sandmo’s outstanding collection of essays on crime and criminals in Norwegian history. Based on court cases and contravention from the seventeenth century until today, he seeks to reveal both the pain of individuals and the fate of common people in their meetings with larger aspects of history.
"The book describes moments in history when continents of time collide, when cultural differences are revealed in dramatic, painful events,” says the author in his introduction. In five essays he shows how these confrontations can shake and destroy the individuals involved, who find themselves in personally disastrous situations that are at the same time about bigger and different things than they.
The book describes dramatic and important court cases, but the perspective is broadened and events take on meaning beyond themselves. The court becomes a cultural focus of events, a place where world views do battle and perish. In such a manner history lives on. It is full of old perceptions of reality and foreign ways of thinking, now suppressed and concealed, but still in existence in the form of questions, loss and pain. For now, as in the past, history is what hurts.
Sandmo’s well-written study of the big events, the common people, the forgotten ideas, and the nature of history makes The Expectations of Murderers a gripping read - for historians as well as a broader public interested in culture.
Contents: Preface/History is What Hurts/The Expectations of Murderers - On a Poisoning and on a Lost Future/God’s Children - On the History of Madness and a Sacrificed Son/A Sex Change in Drøbak - On the Body, Intimacy and a Daughter Who Became a Father/„It isn’t Made by Sheriff or Priest”- On Gjest Baardsen’s Autobiography and the History of the Modern Prison/„Too Good to Be True”- On Exorcism and Social Planning/Sources and Literature
About the Author: Erling Sandmo is an historian and a researcher at the Institute of Social Research. He has also published The Fall of the Violent Society (1999), and is co-author of The History of Norway 750-1537 (1999).
Publisher: Universitetsforlaget AS 1998
ISBN: 82-00-22842-8
193 pp, paperback
