WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder, does more than just titillate with true-crime gore

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder
RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe's foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.

For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.

Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. And just as early humans used the axe to chop down trees, hunt for food, and whittle tools, they also used it to murder. Over time, this particular use has as the axe evolved over centuries to fit the needs of new agricultural, architectural, and social development, so have our lethal uses for it.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture. Whack Job sheds brilliant light on this familiar implement, this most human of weapons. This is a critical examination of violence, an exploration of how technology shapes human conflict, the cruel and sacred rituals of execution and battle, and the ways humanity fits even the most savage impulses into narratives of the past and present.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: End-noted to a fare-thee-well, this rollicking romp through axes as historical objects isn't academic and dry, or deeply in-depth; it's a mountaintop view into the foothills and valleys of human material culture. Using the axe as our viewpoint stand-in makes a lot of sense. In anthropology classes I took in the 1980s, stone tools came in varieties like flakes, blades, and scrapers, all discovered by the carloads; a hand axe was treasure indeed. The knack of flintknapping is easier to acquire for smaller objects. An axe was high tech indeed.

There's a reason an axe centers the fasces in Roman art; there's a reason the axe was buried as often as a sword in Viking graves. They're not just useful, they're mightily impressive and have always been difficult to fashion until fairly recently. A sharp axe is a supremely useful tool for the agricultural way of life. Splitting logs to burn for warmth, making fenceposts to contain cattle and demarcate property, etc etc, are all made trivially easy with ownership of a good, sharp axe.

Splitting wood is, of course, not the only splitting an axe does with effectiveness and relative ease. Author Rachel starts us with split skulls in Neanderthal prehistory, when possession of an axe was a major symbol of power. As the reasons humans kill each other really haven't changed over the millennia (spoiler alert: we enjoy it), the means we choose to do it with haven't either. Whatever is handy, be it rock, knife, or axe. What we don't know in any detail is why the owner of a particular skeleton was deprived of the ghost driving it, though the remains are clearly damaged in specific, tell-tale ways. So Author Rachel talks about axes more in the first third of the book than murders. (Seriously, stop at 30%...chapter six...if details of what happens are not to your taste.)

In historical times, as details become available, they are vouchsafed you.I do not find this particularly bothersome, but if you do, understand this is not going to be an easy book for you to read. We're still focusing on the axes, though, which is what enabled me not to feel queasy. The weapon of choice is contextualized to the extent possible based on the records surviving, be they legal, social, or religious in nature. And has Author Rachel done her archive diving! Literal hundreds of endnotes could probably result in a visit from the spooks if I followed them all up on Google. The thing I appreciate most in a history like this one, focused on a reasonably narrow bit of human behavior, is that sense the author's done a lot more than the minimum. That is definitely the case here.

I don't classify this as a microhistory to myself. It has a narrow focus. It doesn't, however, confine itself to just one bit of History like The Forger's Spell or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, both estimable books. I suppose when your topic is something as universal or as ancient as an axe, one can't feasibly stay in the micro.

Speaking of micro, Author Rachel does not spare us Y-chromosome-havers in her analysis of why axes represent authority. There's a good bit about male insecurity as it relates to symbols of power and status. If I felt she was factually incorrect, or grinding an academic axe (!) too finely to make her point, I'd say so. Instead I shrank a little more every time the topic arose. Well done, madam, point well made. Dealing with how the labrys became a feminist/matriarchal symbol was fascinating.

The structural elements of the book are largely thematic. We're in chapters called things like "In Truth, An Enemy and a Man of Violence" (chapter four, the 500s BCE) and "Five Axes in the Cellar, One Axe on the roof" (chapter nine, Lizzie Borden). Author Rachel's style lends itself to hooks, positioned carefully at the ends of chapters. It makes the read hard to portion out; I usually read a chapter of a book, take a few notes, move to a different book; not here. I read through five chapters in a long afternoon. That's not common for me. I simply didn't want to stop, and the hook-y chapter ends (can't quote them, the Spoiler Stasi will trade their hoses and chains for axes) were designed to keep the reader engaged.

So what happened to the fifth star? It's half there, and deserves to be. I can't offer the full five only because the way Author Rachel mixes it up felt at times as though there were topics she could not go into that she wanted to. That left me wishing for an extra hundred pages and more ridden hobbyhorses.

No matter about cavils so minor as that. If you're interested in anthropology and history through a narrow but deep time-lens, have a good tolerance for murderous acts, and enjoy sly witticisms, this is a solid read for you.