Scope and Contents New York Times book review: William S. Burroughs "didn't say anything for shock value," his student Sam Kashner once observed. "His life had shock value." Born to a prominent St. Louis family in 1914, Burroughs linked his lineage at every point to the fatal plotlines of American hubris and power. His mother's family had been slave owners in the antebellum South; his paternal grandfather invented the adding machine, a building block in the embryonic military-­industrial-media complex. His uncle Ivy Lee, a pioneer of public relations, counted Hitler's regime among his preferred clients. Burroughs himself spent time in Vienna in the 1930s and learned a lesson he never forgot: Everything Hitler did was legal. Laws could spur, not deter, the blackest of crimes. To top it off, young Bill had also attended the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, which in 1943 would be co-opted for the Manhattan Project. "The sick soul, sick unto death, of the atomic age" became his great...