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On May 21, 1991, a popular University of Chicago Divinity School professor named Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The crime remains unsolved. The book pieces together the evidence to show that the murder was in fact what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil. A Romanian emigre and expert in myth and Renaissance magic, Culianu in 1990 began writing and broadcasting his outspoken opposition to his home county's post communist government, resulting in death threats which he reported to friends and colleagues. The books sifts through police, court and published records, drawing on hundreds of interviews, to tell a story of a writer who, by manipulating words, accidentally manipulated the world. (November, 1996)