Here are three short recommendations from the Carleton Alumni List, for which I carelessly neglected to harvest contributors' names. My apologies. I will give effusive credit if I find out who recommended these.
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Here's a review of one of my favorite books, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who are Changing Our World written by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo with photographs by Eddie Adams
This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. The photographs are compelling, as are the portraits of each human rights activist and defender. The book is inspiring, terrifying, and motivating. It explains the torture and terror that many of these individuals have endured without sensationalizing it, and shows how they have been able to not only rise above it on a personal level, but to find ways to eliminate the victimization of others. It should be required reading for all policy makers and concerned world citizens.
The people profiled and portrayed include Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh whose concept of microcredit met a need that wasn't being filled by larger banking institutionsä Rana Husseini of Jordan who has worked to bring an end to honor killings; Wangari Maathai of Kenya who has worked for women's rights and against environmental degradation, Oscar Arias S·nchez of Costa Rica who has campaigned for disarmamentäDesmond Tutu Africa for his work on reconciliation in South Africaä.
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A Problem from Hell
I am currently reading A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and while I can't say it is a pleasant read, I have found it to be very informative, persuasive and often deeply disturbing. It was written by Samantha Power, who was a journalist in Bosnia and currently teaches at the Kennedy School. She has a very impressive resume for someone her age, and she got the Pulitzer for this book to boot.
In it she contrasts the popular image of the US as a world crusader for democracy and human rights vs. the reality of foreign policy decisions to ignore or even indirectly support crimes of genocide committed throughout the 20th century. She does an especially good job of presenting the development of the concept of genocide and the decades-long process in which the member nations of the UN defined it as a crime and agreed in principle to combat it.
Her basic thesis is that it should not surprise anyone that the US government is typically reluctant to intervene in crises involving claims of genocide because it has never been the policy of the US government to emphasize genocide and human rights over strategic interests. She provides several examples in detail, including the massacre of Armenians, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia and the Kurds.
She is clearly a strong advocate for intervention, but you don't have to agree with her conclusions to appreciate the devastating human cost of sitting on the sidelines. At the very least, it is eye opening.
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In the general theme of 'truth', I heartily recommend the truly remarkable Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhensheng (Phaidon Press, 2003 ISBN 0714843083). Its a collection of about 300 photographs and text documenting the Cultural Revolution, taken by Li Zhensheng, who was then a staff photographer with a Party newspaper in Heilongjiang Province. The photos didn't make it into the Party press for obvious reasons, but Li hid the film (some 30,000 images) in his home for decades at considerable personal risk."
I don't think there's a comparable first-hand photo-account of the Cultural Revolution available anywhere. This is solid photography and narrative, some of it chilling, but always fascinating.
A bit more information is available at the Amazon.com site if you search for the title, author, or ISBN.
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By Ken Wedding. 08.19.02 Updated 08.17.04.
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