Cannibals

More about the book

In CANNIBALS, Joseph Cummins has assembled some of the most dramatic and controversial incidents of cannibalism in history. He 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 tragically relates the aftermath of a 1972 Uruguayan airliner crash in the high Andes.But Cummins also brings together little-known and equally shocking tales-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 ritual cannibalism on Allied soldiers during WWII; and much more.CANNIBALS is both a dramatic document and a tool to learn more about this mysterious and little-understood activity.