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Organ Theft Legends. By Véronique Campion-Vincent. Translated by Jacqueline Simpson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. xii + 236 pp.
Campion-Vincent's self-proclaimed objective in Organ Theft Legends is to "make people understand how a collective belief is born and develops-more precisely, how and why there arose a conviction that the theft of organs (particularly children's organs) is systematically carried out nowadays" (x). The breadth and depth of materials necessary to carry out such a study is extensive, and includes hundreds of texts ranging from newspaper articles to televised documentaries, academic books and articles to Resolutions of the European Parliament. The corpus of organ theft stories is divided into three basic types-the baby parts story, eye thieves, and kidney heists-and each is discussed thoroughly. Broken into four chapters, plus an introduction, conclusion, appendix, and a 2005 afterword to the English edition (the book was originally published in French in 1997), Organ Theft Legends proves one of the best-researched works on the topic and is a welcome resource for Englishspeaking scholars.
Chapter 1, "Narratives and the Eegend," is a strictly historical discussion of the origins of the baby parts story in 1987 Honduras, tracing the legend's path then to Guatemala and Paraguay over the course of some two years and highlighting the worldwide attention these narratives immediately received. After apparently dying out in 1989, these legends reappear en masse in 1992, and Campion-Vincent details the sociopolitical situations that made possible their intercontinental acceptance. From Brazil to Peru, Germany to Italy, the popularity of these legends only increased, and began to include stories centered on adult victims as well as children. The chapter closes with a discussion of the acceptance (or nonacceptance) of the three types of narratives.
Chapter 2, "Facts...