This fascinating book should appeal to general readers interested in popular culture, art, and literature. Gerould, a professor of theater and comparative literature, focuses on the guillotine as a cultural artifact, examining its representation in Western art, literature, films, cartoons, and even toys from the revolutionary period to the present. He traces its origin and history, underscoring the ironies of its invention as a quick, simple, humane, and ``democratic'' instrument of death. Lavishly illustrated, the text includes such bizarre material as stories of animals executed by guillotine and accounts of scientific and medical curiosity about the pain experienced by a decapitated body. Little-known details like Nazi use of the guillotine will remind readers that earlier generations were as haunted by memories of the guillotine as we are by the Holocaust.-- Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J.
