Author Benjamin Skinner has written a horrifying book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.

In it, Skinner establishes a nasty little fact: there are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history.

And I know what you’re thinking, you pampered, disillusioned, cynical bastard, “But there are more people on the planet today than at any time in human history. So what’s the comparative ratio of non-slaves to slaves now versus at any time in human history?”

I haven’t read his book yet so I don’t know. But Skinner did find that, after adjusting for inflation, “In 1850, a slave would cost roughly $30,000 to $40,000 — in other words it was like investing in a Mercedes. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl to use as a sexual and domestic slave for $50.”

How did Ben find all this information about modern-day slaves? Like any good western journalist, he tried to buy one. “He was initially told he could get a 9-year-old sex partner/house slave for $100, but he bargained it down to $50.”

“When I was talking to traffickers, I had a principle that I wouldn’t pay for human life,” Skinner explains. “This principle enabled him to keep a certain distance from the system, but not giving in to the temptation to free a suffering human being was an emotionally taxing struggle, he says.”

No shit.

In the book Moments, a collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs, you’ll find a picture by Kevin Carter taken in 1993′s Sudan when the Muslim-controlled government of the North was diverting international aide and starving the country’s people. It shows a vulture waiting for an emaciated child to die.

When Carter won the Pulitzer, some critics said that “a photographer who concerned himself with the picture instead of helping the child was just another vulture on the scene.”

Note: Carter made a few photos, then chased the bird away.

In Moments, you’ll also learn this:

“On the night of July 28, 1994, shortly after he savored his prestigious Pulitzer in New York, Carter parked his red pickup truck alongside a river that passed through the Johannesburg suburb in which he grew up. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe with gaffer tape and threaded it into the cab of the truck, climbed into the vehicle, closed the windows, and turned on the engine.

“The explanatory note he left behind told of a man frustrated by lack of money and haunted by unrelenting memories of killings, madmen with guns, starving children, of corpses and pain.”

No shit.

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