The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment

From one of the most influential figures of the last twenty years—the author of Sexual Politics—comes this brilliant work in which Kate Millet sets out a new theory of politics for our time, a harrowing view of the modern state based on the practice of torture as a method of rule, as conscious policy. It is, in the words of the noted Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, "a passionate, heroic effort to fathom the nature of a phenomenon that all too often drains us emotionally and incapacitates us i...