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	Panzram: A Journal of Murder Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long   Carl Panzram, who called himself the "world's worst murderer," wrote these words in a full autobiography and confession he prepared for the one friend in his life-a young prison guard named Henry Lesser. PANZRAM: A JOURNAL OF MURDER, combines these brutally forthright memoirs with the commentary of authors Gaddis and Long, into a compelling chronicle of the forces that engender hate. The authors provide a historical and sociological framework for Panzram's own words, using this uniquely detailed self-analysis by a mass murderer to depict what happens when an intelligent and unbreakable personality that has been interminably and unmercifully abused strikes back in vengeance.   Panzram was born in 1891 on a small farm in Minnesota and died in 1930 on the gallows at the U.S. Penitentiary, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Imprisoned for most of his life from the age of twelve and brutally punished, Panzram found that ruthless cunning and cruelty were his sole means of survival. In his brief interludes outside the American penitentiary system, Panzram recounts being raped by hoboes as a young boy riding the rails, brutal adventures in Africa and South America as an oil industry roughneck, and various heists and numerous murders around the U.S. Panzram's keen insight into the arbitrary cruelty of his fellow human being is graphically illustrated with a litany of prison tortures, uprisings, reform attempts and betrayals.   PANZRAM arrives as a gripping warning from America's recent past to our newly repressive era of prison-industrial complex, death penalty abuse, and unprecedentedly high rates of incarceration from a man who walked the halls of Death Row with a blindingly clear vision.   AUDIENCE: Fans of true crime, students and professionals in the criminal justice field, advocates of death penalty and prison reform.   Authors:   Thomas E. Gaddis was author of Birdman of Alcatraz and technical director of the film starring Burt Lancaster. Professor and practicing psychologist, Gaddis was the founding director of prison education programs in the Oregon State Penitentiary system.   James O. Long is an award-winning newspaperman and Pulitzer Prize nominee noted for his investigative reporting and feature articles in the Portland Oregonian.   ISBN 1-878923-14-5 : 6" x 9" paperback, 312 pp., $24.95
amokbooks.com 2005
	Reviews:   "I enjoyed the real hell out of it. PANZRAM is one of those people who doesn't exist in your mind until you come across him in life or as here, in a book, and then he never leaves it." - Norman Mailer   "I carried away a vivid image of this earnest, very intense, very profane, very ugly, but obviously thoughtful individual faced with the problem of evil in himself and in the rest of us. . . . I have always carried him in mind as the logical product of our prison system." - Dr. Karl Menninger   "PANZRAM is a horrifying, true book. Yes, truer than true." - James Dickey   "A hefty hardback in which design, illustrations and the text itself are welded into an experience which simple rock books can't dream of." – Alternative Press   "For anybody interested in the psychological and social aspects of crime and violence this is a fascinating and instructive book - a classic of its genre. " - Dr. Fredric Wertham, American Journal of Psychotherapy   "I consider this work, built around the diary of an executed felon who began his career as a lelinquent, one of the most important and insightful ever published. It belongs in the library of every judge, every legislator, every official whose decisions bear on the safety of the public. I heartily recommend it. " -- Dr. Richard R. Korn, professor of criminology, University of California.   "Highly recommended. " - Library Journal   top of page