No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality (Eleanor Learmonth & Jenny Tabakoff, Text)

Cannibalism, murder, sexual slavery—is there no horror homo sapiens won’t mete out to each other in extremis? Evidence overwhelmingly suggests not, as Learmonth and Tabakoff discover in their study of human behavioural psychology in times of severe duress. Taking William Golding’s classic survivalist allegory The Lord of the Flies as its yardstick (and not frivolously—you’ll be astounded by how many real-life dramas have followed its swift plunge from civility to anarchy almost to the letter), No Mercy canvasses a host of history’s most grievous calamities and atrocities, from Rome’s devastating eight-month siege on the city of Numantia in 134 BC to the 2010 collapse of the San José Mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, with plenty of shipwrecks, plane crashes and ill-fated Antarctic expeditions considered along the way. Succinct yet considered, accessible yet authoritative, Learmonth and Tabakoff strike a happy balance between scholarliness and readability throughout. Only the inevitable repetition of certain primary source materials and an arguably superfluous summary of Golding’s novel, which serves as the book’s concluding chapter, detracts from their otherwise cogent presentation of some truly harrowing subject matter, which less responsible hands might have milked for vulgar sensationalism.

Gerard Elson is a freelance writer who works at Readings St Kilda            

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Category: Reviews