Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
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'sMircea 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.