Eros, Magic, & the Murder of Professor Culianu

Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Good in Good jacket Good in Good jacket Very Good in Very Good jacket 9.6 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches. Condition very good in mauve cloth boards with silver lettering on spine, DJ very good in mylar cover glued to the boards, ex-library with usual markings, barcode on mylar cover, ffp excised. Police have been stumped ever since popular University of Chicago Divinity Professor Ioan Culianu was killed in the middle of a workday in a campus bathroom. The 1991 murder has offered few profitable leads. Author Ted Anton suggests strongly that radicals from Culianu's native Romania did the deed. If he's right, then the death of Culianu probably marks the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. The bulk of this book focuses on the life, times, and scholarship of a man heralded by many to be his generation's Mircea Eliade--as well as why Romanian thugs would have any interest in such a person. The case's apparent unsolvability is maddening, but Anton does a fine job of recounting its essentials. From Publishers Weekly In 1991, a 41-year-old Romanian professor, Ioan Culianu, was killed on the University of Chicago campus where he taught. The case is still a mystery, although DePaul University English professor Anton does his best here to explain the exceedingly murky details of Culianu's life, work and death? and their relationship to even murkier events in the Balkans? in clear journalistic prose. The problem is that neither the victim's life nor death lend themselves to clarity. Much of Culianu's political activity remains vague, such as why he phoned someone in Medellin, Colombia, the capital of the world cocaine cartel, shortly before he died. Also unclear is the nature of his relationship with Mircea Eliade, whom he knew to have been an active supporter of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard movement. Some of Anton's descriptions of Culianu's academic achievements are narrated in a gee-whiz style that suggests that were it not for Culianu, well-known thinkers like Giordano... . Good. Hardcover. 1996.