Kimberly Clark was born to the sound of cackling witches in 1984. Having moved to London to follow her heart's dream, the sweet-but-slow Stevie, she soon tires of him and decides to destroy the relationship from within by being as vile as is humanly possible. When this tactic leads to Stevie's violent death by his own hand, Kimberly's soul hangs in the balance - will she ultimately spend eternity in the great Topshop in the sky? Or will she be hurtled into an abyss of endless physical torture, sexual humilation and bad stand-up comedy? This is the story of Kimberly's redemption, or possibly the story of her damnation: it's up to you. There are six different endings to choose between. This is a shocking, laugh-out-loud, nightmare-and-nausea-inducing book; a wild narrative experiment that recalls taboo-busting writers from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh to Chuck Palahniuk.

The history of the execution of women in the United States has largely been ignored and scholars have given scant attention to gender issues in capital punishment. This historical analysis examines the social, political and economic contexts in which the justice system has put women to death, revealing a pattern of patriarchal domination and female subordination. The book includes a discussion of condemned women granted executive clemency and judicial commutations, an inquiry into women falsely convicted in potentially capital cases and a profile of the current female death row population.

Capital punishment, the death penalty, has enjoyed wide public support in the United States as the penalty of choice for one member of society taking the life of another. This viewpoint is not shared by most European governments -- perhaps because their murder rate is considerably lower. DNA testing, however, has begun to shed light not on the appropriateness of the penalty, but on the vastly imperfect system of what is jocularly termed justice. DNA evidence has overturned case after case resulting in a seashift in public opinion. This book examines current statutes dealing with the death penalty and presents a detailed bibliography on the topics with access provided by subject and author indexes.

Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with a diverse group of people who shared their views on religion, race, gender, and politics, Kimberly Cook probes the cultural forces underlying the apparent paradox of opposition to abortion and support for the death penalty. Cook's groundbreaking study provides a new and provocative analysis of assorted perspectives on abortion and capital punishhment.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the “cultural lives”—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.