The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber »

"Scott Christianson has masterfully chronicled the history of the use of gas to kill human beings.
In doing so, he has shown that the Nazi regime drew strength and comfort from the United States' use of the gas chamber beginning nine years before Hitler took power, as well as from the substantial number of gas chamber executions thereafter. While Christianson doesn't claim that the use of the gas chamber here led to the Holocaust, he does highlight ties between the chemical companies who were involved in both gas chambers in the United States and extermination chambers using gas in the Holocaust. This is a truly thought-provoking and eye-opening book."—Ronald J. Tabak, President, New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty

"Scott Christianson has used his extensive experience as an investigative reporter, criminal justice official, historian, and scholar to probe one of the darkest and most neglected regions of American death penalty history—the story of the gas chamber. This book opens new doors and charts new territory in its gripping historical tale documenting the development and use of lethal gas as a method of execution in the United States. As one well acquainted with the realm of capital punishment history and research, Christianson has produced a stellar work that sheds new light on many of the central issues affecting executions."—Dr. Charles S. Lanier, Director of the Capital Punishment Research
Initiative (CPRI), Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center, University at Albany

"By tracing the links between American capital punishment, weapons of mass destruction and Nazi gas chambers, The Last Gasp gives an added dimension to our thinking about the American death penalty. The author has done a great deal of original research and has produced a very thorough history of an interesting and hitherto little known subject."—David Garland, author of The Culture of Control and Punishment and Modern Society

"Christianson has done for lethal gas what others have done for hanging, electrocution, and lethal injection: told its history in a compelling manner. He provides an authoritative story of the way lethal gas was appropriated for use as a technology of execution."—Austin Sarat, author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition

"
In an astonishing, deeply probing and relentless search of the history of the gas chamber, Scott Christianson has made a vital contribution to the understanding that the quest for a 'humane' method of execution must ultimately be fruitless."—Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman, Founding Rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles and Member, Board of Directors, Death Penalty Focus

Publishers Weekly

Investigative journalist Christianson, author of the award-winning With Liberty for Some, charts the 75-year history of gas chamber execution as well as its intersection with eugenics, the Holocaust, and America’s ongoing capital punishment debate. Christianson is clear that his focus is the United States, underscoring that the chamber’s “operation can hardly be described as painless or kind.” After the Germans launched the first gas attack during WWI, American scientists and chemical companies—particularly DuPont, which had ties to the German manufacturers that later supplied concentration camps—scrambled to produce their own lethal concoctions. From their earliest incarnations, gas chambers employed various forms of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) pumped into a sealed room where the condemned was strapped to a chair. Despite being developed as a swifter and more painless alternative to death than hanging or electrocution, Christianson describes in graphic detail the numerous botched executions during which death took over 10 agonizing minutes. Though the gas chamber hasn’t been used in America since 1999, Christianson makes a chilling argument for its—and the death penalty’s—abolition. 8 b&w photos. (July)