Handbook of American Military History Book

I found a reference to this book on the internet while attempting to dig up statistics on the long-term trends in incidence of crime. Records on murder are fairly well-kept, so it is an easy trend to study with statistics and graphs. Unfortunately, the book itself is not so easy to study.

The most interesting part of A History of Murder, and the primary reason I read it, is a graph in the introduction, showing that the murder rate (in Europe) has decreased by a factor of roughly 30 between the 14th century and today. Unfortunately, the plot does not show the error bars on the data, but from the overall smoothness of the decline, I'd say it's pretty clear that we are far safer today than 600, 300, or even 100 years ago.

The body of the book attempts to dissect the trends that contribute to murder rates. I wish the clarity that came with the introductory plot could have been carried through the rest of the pages. Unfortunately, I often found instances where the point behind a paragraph would seem to shift midway through. In particular, the author sprinkles accounts of several interesting cases of murder throughout the book, but sometimes, I felt as if they were thrown in gratuitously, and were not well-connected to the rest of the material in the paragraph into which they were parachuted.

While the book serves as a good point from which to find references on crime statistics from the Middle Ages until the present day, the inconclusive nature of the research in the field shows through in the book. The reader should come to this book prepared to actively research and form his own opinions on the root causes behind statistical trends in murder, as a function of time and circumstance.