Jonathan Kirsch

Tinkering with the
Inquisitor's Toolbox:
The Long Shadow of the Inquisition from the Grand Inquisitor to Abu Ghraib

      The Spanish Inquisition, now mostly and object of parody, was only a branch operation of the engine of persecution that operated for 600 years across Europe and the Americas. Jonathan Kirsch, best-selling author of the newly published The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, traces the unbroken thread that links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early 13th century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-20th century.

      Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Kirsch reveals the shocking history of the Inquisition, and shows how it stands as a universal, ineradicable symbol of the terror that results when absolute power works its corruptions.

      Kirsch is the author of 12 books, including the bestselling A History of the End of the World. He also is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, a guest NPR broadcaster, an Adjunct Professor on the faculty of New York University, and an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property in Los Angeles. Copies of his book will be for sale and signing.

$6, or free for Friends of the Center.

The Center for Inquiry-Los Angeles
4773 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90027
2 blocks west of Vermont
at Berendo
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