Cannibals Shocking True Tales of the Last Taboo on Land and at Sea

Here collected for the first time in one volume, are twenty accounts of humans eating humans - true stories that separate fact from fiction, exploring human depravity and the fight for survival.In Cannibals: Shocking True Tales of the Last Taboo on Land and at Sea, Joseph Cummins has assembled some of the most dramatic incidents of cannibalism in history. Cannibals draws from a powerful account of the disastrous Donner party expedition in the snows of the Sierra Nevada in 1847; from Nathaniel Philbrick's bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, about the wreck of the whaleship Essex in the South Pacific; and from Piers Paul Read's classic Alive, which relates the tragic aftermath of the crash of a Uruguayan airliner in the high Andes in 1972.But Cummins also brings together little-known and equally shocking true accounts - how marauding gangs of cannibals, circa 1150 A.D. may have destroyed a flourishing Southwestern civilization; how modern forensic evidence revealed the horrifying truth behind the vanished 1845 expedition of Arctic explorer John Franklin; how the Japanese practiced cannibalism on Allied soldiers during World War II; and much more.From the serial cannibals of post-World War I Germany to the current controversy over the prevalence of ritual cannibalism in history, Cannibals is both a dramatic document and a chance for us to learn more about this mysterious and little-understood activity. (6 1/4 x 9 1/4, 288 pages)