War Books - Page 2

The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo

Clea Koff

List Price: $24.95 By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 35 new & used starting at $2.16

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In the spring of 1994, Rwanda was the scene of the first acts since World War II to be legally defined as genocide. Two years later, Clea Koff, a twenty-three-year-old forensic anthropologist analyzing prehistoric skeletons in the safe confines of Berkeley, California, was one of sixteen scientists chosen by the UN International Criminal Tribunal to go to Rwanda to unearth the physical evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity. The Bone Woman is Koff’s riveting, deeply personal account of that mission and the six subsequent missions she undertook—to Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo—on behalf of the UN.

In order to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the UN needs to know the answer to one question: Are the bodies those of noncombatants? To answer this, one must learn who the victims were, and how they were killed. Only one group of specialists in the world can make both those determinations: forensic anthropologists, trained to identify otherwise unidentifiable human remains by analyzing their skeletons. Forensic anthropologists unlock the stories of people’s lives, as well as of their last moments.

Koff’s unflinching account of her years with the UN—what she saw, how it affected her, who was prosecuted based on evidence she found, what she learned about the world—is alternately gripping, frightening, and miraculously hopeful. Readers join Koff as she comes face-to-face with the realities of genocide: nearly five hundred bodies exhumed from a single grave in Kibuye, Rwanda; the wire-bound wrists of Srebrenica massacre victims uncovered in Bosnia; the disinterment of the body of a young man in southwestern Kosovo as his grandfather looks on in silence.

Yet even as she recounts the hellish working conditions, the tangled bureaucracy of the UN, and the heartbreak of survivors, Koff imbues her story with purpose, humanity, and an unfailing sense of justice. This is a book only Clea Koff could have written, charting her journey from wide-eyed innocent to soul-weary veteran across geography synonymous with some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. A tale of science in the service of human rights, The Bone Woman is, even more profoundly, a story of hope and enduring moral principles.

Mengele: The Complete Story

Gerald L. Posner, John Ware

List Price: $18.95 By: McGraw-Hill Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $4.25

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

We still don't know who this thug was 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

That's the feeling one -regretably- obtains after going thru all the pages of this book. One quarter of it is dedicated to his ignominious "works", so it's the only chance we get to know about this criminal; because the other three quarters are about the his wherabouts since the war ended.

There are no first hand testimonies or interviews to peersons who knew him. It all sounds like third person stories, and this is not to question his atrocities at all: there's more than proof to have had him executed many times. I am not looking for necrophilic detail or sadistic descriptions. What I wanted is to know the man closer, his way of thinking, his circumstance, his motivations. The book deals with this very, very, superficially.

The hunt can't be called exactly a hunt, not by far as interesting as the The House on Garibaldi Street (Classics of Espionage) on Eichmann, one of the most exciting books I've read of any subject.

Posner's book lacks substance, grip, interest. A subject like this guy is almost hard not to make it interesting.

Editorial Review:

Examines the notorious Nazi's life.

They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague

Slavenka Drakulic

List Price: $22.95 By: Viking Adult Amazon Marketplace: 27 new & used starting at $0.01

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In her novel S., Slavenka Drakulic´ explored the horror of genocide and the lives that were ripped apart during the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s. Now, in They Would Never Hurt a Fly, she confronts one of the consequences of that war—the prisoners being tried at The Hague for their war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

During that terrible and bloody clash, countless humans were tortured, raped, and murdered—unspeakable acts committed in the name of “ethnic cleansing” and all authorized by the government. Drakulic´ introduces readers to the accused—from the infamous to the unknown to the unquestionably guilty, including former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic´—seeking to understand the people behind the horrific crimes. She asserts that the trials are important not just because of the dead, but also because of the living. “In the end,” she writes about the war criminals, “what matters... is one single important question: what would I do in their situation?”

My Lai: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Amazon Price: $60.37 List Price: $79.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Palgrave Macmillan Amazon Marketplace: 24 new & used starting at $48.50

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Subjects -> History -> Asia -> Vietnam -> General

Editorial Review:

This volume introduces students to the most controversial incident of the Vietnam War - the My Lai massacre when almost 400 Vietnamese civilians were killed in four hours. The authors discuss the ramifications of the cover-up and the ensuing investigations for the American public, policymakers, the anti-War movement and the soldiers involved. They examine the causes of the massacre and the issues of culpability and human rights. The narrative is built around 70 primary documents drawn mainly from testimony and reports from the government enquiry into the outrage.

Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial

Joseph E. Persico

List Price: $25.95 By: Viking Adult Amazon Marketplace: 21 new & used starting at $2.19

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Nazis 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the only nonfiction books I've ever read, and it was well worth the effort. Although nearly everyone will be quick to place Hitler at the top of their 'most evil men in history' list, the rest of the Nazi coterie are not so well known, and what we find is a cast of characters worthy of any fictional account. You have Albert Speer, the sensitive and morally astute architect who nevertheless relied on slave labor to build his masterpieces; Goering, a bombastic wit who destroyed his captors and fellow inmates alike; Von Schirach, the eerily handsome youth leader described by one prosecution attorney as 'the sort of scout master who molests young boys;' Von Schacht, the imposing old financial genius who admits, grudginly, that he has some trouble with basic arithmetic; Julius Streicher, the lunatic propogandist, who swears at children and does nude calisethnics in front of the guard assigned to watch him.

The account is, however, very long, and I found the sections about the various other personalities involved in the trial uninteresting (well, it's difficult to compete with some of the most dramtically evil men of the century). If you're willing to skim a few passages (which is would be unacceptable in a novel, but which doesn't do much harm with a work like this), I think you'll find this very interesting, whether as a student of history, an artist, or anyone attempting to expand their knowledge of human nature.

Editorial Review:

Using firsthand documents, the author recounts the trial of Nazi officials at Nuremberg, analyzing the day-to-day struggles among the prosecutors and judges, the evidence of unprecedented atrocities, and the personalities of the accused. 35,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Tour.

The Nuremberg Interviews

Leon Goldensohn

Amazon Price: $12.21 List Price: $17.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 42 new & used starting at $6.80

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Five Minutes Past the Thousand-Year Reich . . . 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 19 people found this review helpful.

Learning that an America soldier, psychiatrist and MD had the opportunity to examine this Germanic rabble in 1946 was simply too intellectually enticing to ignore, and Robert Gellately's compilation of Dr. Leon Goldensohn's interviews with some major members of the Nazi tribe is just as fascinating and nauseating as I had expected. While `The Nuremburg Interviews' sometimes seems rather like notes from a sophomore psyche class, the book is - in its antiseptic purity - the nearest approximation to explaining the inexplicable, and the nearest to giving some understanding of the incomprehensible.

This lack of editorializing is the book's greatest value. The patients of Dr. Leon Goldensohn (19 of whom are on trial and 10 of whom are just 6 months shy of becoming strange fruit) seem every inch a gentleman . . . Hermann Göring is "friendly, eager to talk, and quite comfortable" while Wilhelm Keitel is "always in a good mood for talking" as Alfred Jodl bleats "you come to see the others but rarely to see me."

To read their interviews is to be struck dumb by their cordial banality. Perhaps most haunting of all is to come to the realization that these men are not monsters but men who acted monstrously in ways that would inspire the devil himself.

Stanley Milgram proved as much in his studies at Yale University and his book "Obedience to Authority." In it, Milgram demonstrated that we are truly a potentially twisted species; frightfully capable of astonishing cruelty when merely nudged in the wrong direction.

`The Nuremburg Interviews' is an ugly read, but an undeniably fascinating one.

Editorial Review:

During the Nuremberg trials, Dr. Leon Goldensohn–a psychiatrist for the U.S. Army–monitored the mental health of two dozen German leaders charged with carrying out genocide. These recorded conversations have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years, until Robert Gellately–one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany–made them available to the public in this remarkable collection.

Here are interviews with the likes of Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop–the highest ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails. Here too are interviews with lesser-known officials essential to the inner workings of the Third Reich. Candid and often shockingly truthful, The Nuremberg Interviews is a profound addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission.

Eichmann and the Holocaust (Penguin Great Ideas)

Hannah Arendt

Amazon Price: $8.95 List Price: $8.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 39 new & used starting at $4.96

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A disertation of Eichman and his behavior 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 6 people found this review helpful.

This is essentially an excerpt from a larger study. This focuses on the 'why' Eichman was the person responsible for such horror. An in depth study is taken to look at the specifics of the holocaust, its organization by Jews, the normalcy of those prosecuted at the end of the war and Eichman's arrogant demeanor at trial.

Editorial Review:

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin’s Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history’s most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmaker’s art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped our world.

Presidential War Power

Louis Fisher

List Price: $35.00 By: University Press of Kansas Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $5.40

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Preeminent constitutional authority Louis Fisher chronicles the dramatic expansion--from George Washington to Bill Clinton--of presidential war power. Executive initiatives, he argues, come at the expense of congressional control and violate the Constitution. Indeed, the post-World War II political climate has promoted extra-constitutional actions by presidents eager to redefine the meanings of "emergency powers" and "defensive war." Flashpoints like Haiti, Bosnia, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, he contends, provide predictable manifestations of an increasingly overreaching presidency.

Constitutionally, Congress was empowered to declare and authorize war. Yet, thanks largely to a docile Congress and negligent judiciary, presidents have virtually confiscated the power to make war. That process has hardly been curbed by the War Powers Resolution (1973) and more recent signs of congressional backbone. As a result, Presidents Bush (in the Persian Gulf) and Clinton (in Haiti and Bosnia) have tried to sidestep congressional approval by asserting United Nations authority for military actions beyond our borders. Fisher is emphatic: Such actions violate the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.

More than a comprehensive history and critical commentary on the growth of presidential power, Fisher's book also addresses fundamental questions--what defines self-defense? what constitutes a commitment of forces? should the War Powers Resolution be reauthorized?--and reminds us again of how much is at stake every time we go to war.

The Nuremberg Legacy: How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Course of History

Norbert Ehrenfreund

Amazon Price: $18.45 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Palgrave Macmillan Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $10.15

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Judgment of Nuremberg 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This important book is an eye-witness account of the Nuremberg trials written by then journalist and now Judge Norbert Ehrenfreund. It is the type of book all should read: the young to learn of the legacy of this, history's most important trial, and the old as a reminder of what occurred and its lessons. Truly, the past is prologue and the Trials gave the world meticulously documented evidence of Nazi atrocities and set forth a lasting moral/legal judgment that wars of aggression and the murder of innocents are world class crimes for which the wrongdoers will face the judgment of the civilized world. The relevance of the Trials, as the author convincingly proclaims, is as important today as when the Trials took place sixty years ago.

Editorial Review:

Sixty years have passed since the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals, but that event still stands as the foundation of international justice. Nuremberg not only ignited a revolution in international law but affected domestic law as well with its simple but profound priniciple that every individual accused of crime is entitled to a full and fair hearing.This book reveals how the precedents set at Nuremberg have affected human rights, race relations, medical practice, big business and even Germany's post-war development. It also examines the Nuremberg trials' influence on the modern war crimes trials of tyrants like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.

Justice at Nuremberg

Robert E. Conot

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A very thorough account 5 out of 5 stars.
28 of 28 people found this review helpful.

For those who enjoyed TNT's Nuremburg movie and would like to develop a more complete understanding of the trial, "Justice at Nuremburg" is for you. Author Robert Conot does a lot more than just recount the trial of the leading Nazis. He gives a full portrayal of their crimes and details their actions while they were in allied custody both before and during the trial. Conot also gives the background on the leading allied prosecutors and judges as well as detailing the increasing Cold War friction that surrounded the trial. The Nuremburg trial set the standard for international war crimes tribunals as we know them today. Many precedents were established that are still with us. But it is the fascinating (and revolting) stories of the defendant's themselves that make this book so compelling.

Editorial Review:

Here, for the first time in one volume, is the full story of crimes committed by the Nazi leaders and of the trials in which they were brought to judgement. Conot reconstructs in a single absorbing narrative not only the events at Nuremburg but the offenses with which the accused were charged. He brilliantly characterizes each of the twenty-one defendants, vividly presenting each case and inspecting carefully the process of indictment, prosecution, defense and sentencing.