Ranking History’s Atrocities by Counting the Corpses

Browsing the bookstore shelves can pose its grim challenges for the ordinary mortal. The reproachful cover of “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” is bad enough. There’s also “100 Birds to See Before You Die,” “100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die!” and “1,001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.” Make your way through “50 Places to Play Golf Before You Die” and you’re still not done: “50 More Places to Play Golf Before You Die” is staring right at you.

nto this profusion of lists comes Matthew White, a self-described “atrocitologist” and numbers freak from Richmond, Va., who has compiled yet another — more sobering — roll call to ponder. With its stylishly lurid graphics and goofy asides, “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities” may seem more like an aspiring classic of macabre bathroom reading than a serious effort. But Mr. White’s book, published this week by W. W. Norton, arrives trailing some impressive scholarly affirmation, including a ringing foreword from the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker....

He has no college degree or formal training in history or statistics. He does not attend academic conferences or publish in scholarly journals. He does not visit archives, instead culling numbers from far-flung secondary sources during off hours from his job as a librarian at the federal courthouse in Richmond. His Web site includes links to Tolkien-inspired maps and random self-help reflections (the page for “How to Overcome Procrastination” is listed as “Under Construction”), along with links to carefully annotated compilations of war statistics. He prefers jaunty terms like multicide, megadeath and hemoclysm to sober, morally charged ones like genocide....

In his foreword to “The Great Big Book” Mr. Pinker — who drew on Mr. White’s work for own new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” — credits him with compiling “the most comprehensive, disinterested and statistically nuanced estimates available.”

Charles Maier, a historian of modern European history at Harvard who stumbled on Mr. White’s Web site five years ago when searching for reliable death counts in the two world wars, doesn’t put it that strongly but welcomes his painstaking efforts nonetheless.

“These figures are notoriously elusive,” Mr. Maier said, adding that Mr. White “seems to have tried to get the best figures he could.”...