Algemene kennis

Geboortedatum: 1939
Overlijdensdatum: 2022-02-14
Geslacht: male
Nationaliteit: Canada
Geboorteplaats: Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada
Plaats van overlijden: St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
Woonplaatsen: Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Warsaw, Poland
Israel
Opleiding: University of British Columbia (BA)
University of British Columbia (MA)
University of Toronto (PhD|Anthropology)
Beroepen: social anthropologist
university professor emeritus
Organisaties: Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association
Agent: Beverley Slopen Literary Agency
Korte biografie: Dr. Elliott Leyton is the past President of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association; the author/editor of eleven books and many essays in the scholarly journals; Research Fellow at The Queen's University of Belfast in Ireland, sometime lecturer on homicide at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police College in Ottawa, and the National Police College in Poland, as well as visitor at the FBI Academy; and has held permanent and visiting faculty appointments at The Queen's University of Belfast in N. Ireland, the University of Toronto, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warsaw in Poland, and the Memorial University of Newfoundland where he is currently Professor Emeritus of anthropology.

He has devoted most of his career to the anthropological study of 'social problems' in modern complex societies. During this time, he has completed fieldwork among business people in Vancouver; with Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland; among dying miners and widows in Newfoundland; with juvenile delinquents in an Atlantic 'reform school'; with Scotland Yard and South Yorkshire police in Britain; and among Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders emergency medical personnel in Rwanda and Kenya. In 2004, the National Film Board film about his life's work, The Man Who Studies Murder, was premiered at the Montreal Film Festival, and then aired on national CBC Television's THE NATURE OF THINGS as a two-part "mini-series".

http://aorpresents.com/dr-elliott-ley...

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Hunting humans : the rise of the modern multiple… door Elliott Leyton

Disappointing.
I must be the unusual resident of Canada; I'm uninterested in most of what happens in the land that lies mostly just to the south of this one. When I saw that Leyton is Canadian, working in a Canadian university, I jumped to the conclusion that his discussion would range farther than the confines of the United States. Beyond that, I did not expect to read about 300 pages of descriptions of crimes larded with his moral condemnations of the perpetrators and rehashed pop psych followed by a meagre 100 pages or so of lite analysis.
Dreary reading.… (meer)

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wbell539 | 2 andere besprekingen | Dec 22, 2021 |

Sole Survivor: Children Who Murder Their Families door Elliott Leyton

The back cover of this book made it seem like one of those trashy, tabloidesque true crime books I don't care for, and I hesitated to read it. I'm glad I did anyway, because Sole Survivor turned out to be much more serious and sober in tone than I expected. The author presents a series of case studies, mainly from the 1970s, of children who murdered their whole families (or almost their whole families; sometimes there were survivors). Besides covering the homicides themselves and their immediate aftermath, he delves into a social history of each family. His argument is that these familiacides (his term) occur because the family, often struggling to rise in socioeconomic status, puts unbearable pressure on the child until his/her entire identity is lost, and by killing the family the child is simply trying to assert themselves as an individual.

I'm still not sure what I think of Leyton's theory, but I found this book to be quite interesting and thought-provoking. My copy is from 1992; I wonder if later editions include more recent examples.

(Oh, I should note here that the title means "children" in the sense of "offspring." Only one of the murderers in this book was actually a minor child at the time of the killing; all the others were young adults.)… (meer)

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meggyweg | Apr 2, 2010 |

Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple… door Elliott Leyton

Although this book is valuable for its analysis of some not-all-that-famous multiple murderers (Carl Panzram and Charles Starkweather for example), I found its argument to be complete... well... bull. The author basically said serial and mass murderers were striking back against the economic and social hierarchies in American society by their choice of victims, that the killers were attacking the middle class which they had been unable to enter themselves.

I'm sure that can be considered a partial explanation for some multiple murderers' behavior, but it certainly isn't everything, and I thought the author disregarded a lot of evidence that did not fit his theory. I mean, to begin with, not all serial killers are poor or low-class; some are born into wealth (Charles Ng) or become wealthy through their own efforts (John Wayne Gacy made a great living as a contractor for awhile; ditto Christopher Wilder) and kept killing the whole time.

The reader should also be aware that this is much more an anthropology book than true crime (the author is an anthropologist after all). If you're looking for gore, watch a slasher film. If you're looking for in depth personal stories about the killers or victims, go read Ann Rule. This is an academic kind of book -- not a bad book at all, but not as good as it could have been, and not what it was presented as.… (meer)

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meggyweg | 2 andere besprekingen | Mar 4, 2009 |

Hunting Humans: Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers door Elliott Leyton

Thanks to the problems with amazon details of this edition were lost. I do have a copy but it is in one of the boxes in my house somewhere. I did find the cover on my hard disk. Now I need to figure out how many pages. I remember it was a small book.Anyone? Otherwise I will just guess a number till I find my book. I hate seeing 0 pages.

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Marlene-NL | 2 andere besprekingen | Apr 12, 2013 |

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