http://artsfuse.org/36188/short-fuse-book-review-violence-reduced-to-freudian-or-biblical-scripture/
4/28/11
Bloodlust: On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to
the Present by Russell Jacoby. Free Press, 256 pages, $24.
The subtitle of Russell Jacoby's new book — "On the
Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present" — announces an
ambition at once vast and oddly
delimited. Did human violence begin when Cain slew Abel, as per a Hebrew text
composed no more than three thousand years ago? Does this imply that there was
no violence among our kind in the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the
redaction of tales that come down to us in Biblical scripture? Or does Jacoby
mean to say that pre-Biblical violence is beyond the scope of his book because
its root system somehow differs from that which underlies the violence he will examine?