AS IF

Hardback. We've grown almost desensitised to horror. We can even explain the causes of random murder to ourselves: madness, sexual fantasy, rejection. But one event 20yrs ago reduced every person to silence: the beating to death of the infant James Bulger by two 10yr old boys. All over the world the images on the murky video film of the two children leading the toddler by his hand looped uselessly in peoples' minds. How and why did two innocent boys kill another? Is childhood innocence a myth? And what punishment could fit such a crime - assuming that children are fit to stand trial for murder? At the trial in Preston, the author discovered a sad ritual of condemnation with two bewildered children at its centre. For a month, policemen and witnesses told the How of it. The truth of the Why lay elsewhere. The author went to Liverpool, and sought explanations in the boys' families, and looked at the violence that saturated the minds of modern children. He delved deep into his relations with his own kids, and from his own childhood remembered how easy it was to go along with cruelty. He gives a devastating portrait of the majesty and impotence of the law when faced with a tragedy that wrecked three families' lives. A book that exposes the hollowness of condemnation divorced from understanding. 245pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. With loosely inserted newspaper cutting relating to Denise Bulger's attack on the book's contents. F. in F. dw.