skopia
Greasers and Socs settle their hatred with fists and knives in Tulsa, narrated by fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis. Hinton wrote it at sixteen, and it is still the novel American schools hand to thirteen-year-olds.
Alex is fifteen and narrates his nights of assault in Nadsat, a slang welded from Russian and Cockney. The state conditions the violence out of him, and Burgess asks whether forced goodness counts.
Violence was not the French Revolution's tragic accident but its engine, Schama argues, and the Terror merely 1789 with a higher body count. The book drew furious rebuttals from historians on the left.
Keegan asked what a battle feels like to the man standing in it, and answered through Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. He put the reader inside the ranks and remade military history.
Riding with Bolshevik Cossacks through Poland in 1920, a Jewish intellectual watches them sack towns and kill prisoners. Babel writes the atrocity in sentences so beautiful that the effect is obscene.
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.