Engaging and entertaining. A recommended purchase for collections where deep dive niche NF is popular - or where readers are missing Mary Roach.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Whack Job was a really great book. It is equal parts entertaining and informative. McCarthy James has a really engaging writing style that helped with the flow of this book. I definitely found myself wanting to know more about axes, and the history surrounding some of them. I couldn’t put this book down!

This was a fascinating history book about the axe, it had that research element that I was looking for from the description. The research was so well done and had me learning about what was happening. Rachel McCarthy James wrote this well and I hope to read more.

Everything you ever wanted to know about axe-murder.

Rachel McCarthy James spins a vivid yarn of the history of this most prosaic of murder weapons. As long as humans have had axes, a transformative and versatile tool, we have also used them to end other human’s lives. As long as we’ve used them to chop tree branches, we’ve also used them to sever human limbs, really the comparisons are endless. More dramatic than a knife but easier to use than a sword, McCarthy James sets out to delve into the “why” behind this particular form of homicide.

All the classics are here, Lizze Borden gets a chapter mostly to herself (I think she was innocent, by the way) and the iconic axe centric scene in The Shining gets a moment in the limelight as well. But more interesting are the lesser known axe-murders through history, Freydis of Greenland, Seqenre Tao, and William Tillman (who takes the prize for the most based axe murder in this or any other book, seriously, look him up and get that man a movie deal).

Through it all the writing is vivid, cogent, and rapid, reading this is like taking a tour of an especially macabre museum from a funny but very well informed tour guide. While the details can be shocking even in our violence saturated age (holy crap was the chapter on Linda Joyce Glucoft upsetting on a visceral level), this book is ultimately informative and offers a meditative view on an oft sensationalized topic.

(3.5 rounded down) This is exactly what the cover advertises - a history of axe murder. Twelve murders divided into twelve chapters. I definitely preferred the back half of the book to the front half. I found the chapters on crimes committed in ancient times to be hard to connect with - the writing was a bit clinical and I found myself reading without taking anything in. The crimes that were more modern and more well-known (Lizzie Borden, Candy Montgomery, and the axe murders at Frank Lloyd’s Wright’s Taliesin), I found to be easier to read (which is a weird sentence to write about axe murder, but hey, that’s what I signed up for with the title). It is nice to read a true crime-esque book that is focused on a central topic as opposed to a singular crime. It’s not exploitative due to the fact that the murders aren’t the central topic - the crime if axe murder is. If the title sounds interesting to you, I feel like you would enjoy your time with this.

Whack Job takes readers on an unflinching journey through humanity’s fascination with the axe, tracing its evolution from tool to terror. This captivating narrative hacks through centuries of bloody history—from ancient murder scenes to pop culture shockers. Sharp, brutal, and eerily illuminating, it’s a gripping exploration of how a simple blade has embedded itself into human lore. And that cover is to die for!

Whack Job doesn’t shy away from its bloody past; instead, it dives headfirst into infamous murders, historical executions, and the cultural legacy of this deadly tool. With each chapter, it challenges readers to confront the darker side of our relationship with tools—a reminder that behind every blade lies a reflection of our most primal instincts.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read and review Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder prepublication.