IngramSpark Full Description
Human cruelty rarely arrives wearing horns. More often, it arrives with a clipboard, a title, a budget, a badge, a clerical collar, a white coat, a quarterly report, or a policy explaining why the dead are complicated.
Humans Are Pieces of Shit is a profane, darkly funny, evidence-driven autopsy of what people do when greed, fear, obedience, ambition, and cowardice become organized. Beginning with prehistoric violence and the earliest machinery of slavery, empire, law, and bureaucracy, D.A. Gagné follows the human appetite for exploitation across continents, centuries, governments, religions, companies, families, prisons, hospitals, trafficking networks, corrupt states, and fraudulent aid systems.
The book examines violence and extraction across Africa, Europe, Asia, Russia, the Americas, Hawaii, Oceania, and the Pacific before turning its attention to the institutions that make cruelty repeatable: organized religion, corporations, private equity, policing, incarceration, medicine, human trafficking, kleptocracy, disaster relief, and reconstruction.
This is not an indictment of any race, nationality, religion, or culture. Continents do not commit crimes. Bloodlines do not sign contracts. Responsibility belongs to the rulers, officials, executives, soldiers, predators, collaborators, institutions, and ordinary participants the evidence identifies.
Built from court records, government reports, official investigations, international tribunals, public-health findings, academic research, archival materials, and established journalism, the book distinguishes convictions from allegations, documented findings from disputed estimates, and historical evidence from authorial judgment.
The language is intentionally confrontational because sanitized phrases such as collateral damage, market failure, misconduct, and administrative error often function as moral air freshener. This book translates them back into bodies, families, stolen money, broken trust, and human choice.
But this is not one uninterrupted scream. Investigators preserve evidence. Survivors testify. Workers organize. Journalists expose lies. Families refuse silence. Communities rebuild. Their courage does not erase the crimes. It proves another choice was available.
Brutal, extensively documented, furious, and frequently very funny, Humans Are Pieces of Shit puts the species on trial-and refuses to let any of us hide behind the comforting belief that the bastards are always somebody else.
