Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu - Paperback

by Ted Anton (Author)

Winner of 1997 Carl Sandburg Award

On May 21, 1991, University of Chicago professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, award-winning investigative reporter Ted Anton shows that the murder is what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.

Back Jacket

On May 21, 1991, popular University of Chicago Divinity School Professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, Ted Anton pieces together the evidence and shows that the murder is in fact what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. This book traces Culianu's life from his privileged childhood in Romania, through his days at the University of Bucharest, where he first encountered the methods of Securitate surveillance, to his time at the University of Chicago, where, as a handpicked successor to Mircea Eliade, he was becoming a renowned scholar in his own right. Anton shows how Culianu - an expert on magic and the occult whose predications were often remarkabley accurate - began toying with a new far-right coalition in Romania, taunting them from the presumed safety of his American base with the content and tone of his articles, goading them into believing him dangerous. Besides shedding new light on the murder, this book offers a fascinating introduction to Romanian politics in the aftermath of the 1989 revolution and to the relation of ideas to power in current history, as well as to the exotic and mystical ideas of a brilliant man.

Author Biography

TED ANTON is an associate professor of nonfiction writing in the English department at DePaul University. His book, Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu (1996) received the Carl Sandburg Award for Nonfiction from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library and was an Investigative Reporters and Editors National Book Award finalist. Anton was the co-editor of "The New Science Journalists" (1995). His magazine work, for The Sciences, Publishers Weekly, Lingua Franca, Chicago, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications, has been cited three consecutive times in Best American Essays and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in Reporting in 1993. A former Fulbright Research Fellow, Anton speaks about science on radio and to university and industry groups.