TOM AND HUCK DON'T LIVE HERE ANY MORE Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America

Hardback. Something had gone terribly wrong in Hannibal, Missouri. Within the space of six weeks, two killings - a manslaughter and then a murder - had taken place in the town that Mark Twain consecrated in his timeless classics about boyhood, the town that so proudly called itself "America's Home Town." Both were committed by adolescents. The author felt compelled to revisit Hannibal. He had grown up there, and news of the crimes violated his faith in the town as an American sanctuary. The old "world headquarters of childhood" was not immune to the new national trend of violence by children. His hope was to find some explanation, some solace, some way of squaring these horrific tragedies with what he remembered about "his" Hannibal. Seamlessly interweaving an account of the killings - and the trials of the lost boys who committed them - and a memoir of growing up, the author has written a deeply compelling indictment of an America that has broken faith with its children. What he found in Hannibal provided no simple answers to the question of why children kill. Compassionate but unsparing, the book illuminates the tortured paradox of childhood in present-day America: romanticised in public rhetoric but brutalised by countless acts of indifference, ignorance, and aggression. While no one can fully explain what makes children kill, the author places the unthinkable squarely at the heart of America's story. Illus. + Index. 316pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in F. dw.