Reviewing the book “American Homicide” in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore mulls the question: Why is our history so murderous? She writes, “The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven't often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another.”
Lepore continues, “Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen's research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book ‘American Homicide’ (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth's argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.”