For as long as the axe has been in our hands, people have used it to kill.
At least, that’s the idea behind "Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder" by author Rachel McCarthy James, who hails from Kansas.
"I got really fascinated with the phrase 'ax-murderer,' because you hear it used a lot, often as a joke," McCarthy James told KCUR's Up To Date. "You don't say 'gun-slayer,' you don't say 'knife-killer,' things like that."
The book spans some half a million years of history, as told through the axe as both a tool of survival and a weapon of convenience.
And "Whack Job" isn't McCarthy James' first foray into the topic of axe murder.
In 2017, she co-authored "The Man from the Train" with her father, baseball writer Bill James, about a series of families murdered around the turn of the 20th century.
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