Click a book or video within a section to read about or buy it at Amazon.com
This section is devoted to politics, crime, and everything awful
The rating system used is as follows:
5 Melted Elephants: Mind-bogglingly excellent. All that will remain of your elephant will be a bubbling grey liquid.
4 Melted Elephants: Truly remarkable. The eyes looking out from the seething mass which was your elephant will alarm small children.
3 Melted Elephants: Interesting and worthwhile. Your elephant's features will swirl as though the world were the reflection in a glassy lake.
2 Melted Elephants: Has redeeming features. Your elephant will be sticky to the touch.
1 Melted Elephant: Not up to snuff. If you even attempt to test the consistency of your elephant it may trample you or turn away in disgust.
Slavery : A World History
by Milton Meltzer
3 Melted Elephants
Politics in its purest form.
Slave Testimony : Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies
by John W. Blassingame (Editor)
3 Melted Elephants
First person accounts, but disappointingly none of the slaves who helped construct the US Capitol are represented.
The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
by Iris Chang
3 Melted Elephants
Is it irrelevant to note here that My Lai 4 and Cover-Up, popular masterpieces of journalism by Seymour Hersh - probably America's most prestigious investigative reporter - have long been out of print?
Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie, Special Director's Cut (1997)
5 Melted Elephants
Come see how the world ends. Now in 3D!
Beyond the Limits : Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future
by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows (Contributor), Jorgen Randers (Contributor)
3 Melted Elephants
As more and more people crowd onto the ascending elevator of the 21st Century, scientists debate computer models which might predict when the cable will snap.
The Politics of Heroin : CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
by Alfred W. McCoy
5 Melted Elephants
Read it and weep.
Dark Alliance : The Cia, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
by Gary Webb
5 Melted Elephants
This book does not say that government is the legislative arm of organized crime.
The Seventy Greatest Conspiracies of All Time : History's Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals
by Jonathan Vankin, John Whalen
4 Melted Elephants
Paranoia for the masses.
The Myth of Repressed Memory : False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
by Elizabeth Loftus, Katherine Ketcham
5 Melted Elephants
Therapy itself can be mad.
The Serial Killer Letters: A Penetrating Look Inside the Minds of Murderers
by Jennifer Furio( Editor)
3 Melted Elephants
Sunday School teacher and young mother Jennifer Furio obsessively corresponded with the most awful people she could. Unsettling interpersonal dynamics.
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath
5 Melted Elephants
Explain to me how descent into suicidal depression could have thrown up some of the most beautiful poems ever written.
Private Worlds of Dying Children
by Myra Bluebond-Langner
5 Melted Elephants
This heartbreaking, important book set in a hospital ward reads like the best kind of anthropological writing.
Touching the Void: The Harrowing First Person Account Of One Man's Miraculous Survival
by Joe Simpson
5 Melted Elephants
A gripping, well-written account of someone left for dead in a crevasse