This was a print book I picked up somewhere a long time ago, and just now got around to reading. Frankly, it was boring. Parts were interesting. Many parts were very saddening and even anger-inducing, but that said, it's history and there's nothing we can do about it now except to resolve to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again.
The truly sad thing is that even though we, as individuals, may resolve that and mean it, things are really no better now than they were. No, we typically do not have torture chambers and an organized pogrom against 'others' as we had back then, but people are still demonized, villified and harassed for their beliefs, or their skin color or their sexuality, or their weight, or something else, even in a country like the USA. We've seen this dehumanizing villainy stoked and encouraged by people in positions of power over the last four years in particular, and hatred, division, detestation, and denial have almost become the norm.
With regard to this book, the problem is that it seemed so repetitive. Even as it talked of different locales and different inqusisitors, the talk was largely the same - I mean there was not a lot of variation in how they did this grisly work from one year to the next, or from one country to another. It's the same thing over and over, and the kind of extended exposure to these stories in a book like this seems to serve only to inure and numb people to these horrors.
It saddens me to have to report that I grew bored of it by the time I was about halfway through, and DNF'd it. I can't commend it as a history book unless you're really into documentary detail about the horrific way humans have treated one another through the years, but the religious torture of people still continues in a less organized and less aggressive way.
As I post this, news has just come out of the now right-wing US Supreme Court siding with religious idiots in allowing them to gather en masse - for mass - meaning that Coronavirus, which is already out of control in the US, is now being encourgaged to attack and slaugther many tens of thousands more people than it has already. The fallout from this is going to be horrific. It could be prevented, but selfish, rank stupidity rules this year, it seems.
I don't recall what I was expecting from this book when I bought it, but perhaps my feeling for it has changed since then. Anyway for me, this one was not a worthy read for one reason or another.
