A masterly and moving account of the most horrific hidden atrocity of World War II: Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp built for women
 
On a sunny morning in May 1939 a phalanx of 867 women—housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes—was marched through the woods fifty miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking...

A "riveting and illuminating" Bill Gates Summer Reading pick about how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't (Yuval Noah Harari), by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the landmark bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals...

"Confronting Nazi evil is the subject of the latest installment in the mega-bestselling Killing series. As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run. A few were swiftly caught, including the notorious SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Others, however, evaded capture through a sophisticated Nazi organization designed to hide them. Among those war...

Winner, Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2002, Non-Fiction The story of Pec-Kosovo's most destroyed city during the wars in Serbia For every survivor of a crime, there is a criminal who forces his way into the victim's thoughts long after the act has been committed. Reporters weren't allowed into Kosovo during the war without the permission of the Yugoslavian government but Matthew McAllester went anyway. In Beyond the Mountains of the Damned he...

Interviewing war criminals and their victims, Neuffer explains, through the voices of people she follows over the course of a decade, how genocide erodes a nation's social and political environment. Her characters' stories and their competing notions of justice-from searching for the bodies of loved ones, to demanding war crime trials, to seeking bloody revenge-convinces readers that crimes against humanity cannot be resolved by simple talk of forgiveness,...

The Rwandan genocide has become a touchstone for debates about the causes of mass violence and the responsibilities of the international community. Yet a number of key questions about this tragedy remain unanswered: How did the violence spread from community to community and so rapidly engulf the nation? Why did individuals make decisions that led them to take up machetes against their neighbors? And what was the logic that drove the campaign of extermination? According...

In the horrific events of the mid-1990s in Rwanda, tens of thousands of Hutu killed their Tutsi friends, neighbors, even family members. That ghastly violence has overshadowed a fact almost as noteworthy: that hundreds of thousands of Hutu killed no one. In a transformative revisiting of the motives behind and specific contexts surrounding the Rwandan genocide, Lee Ann Fujii focuses on individual actions rather than sweeping categories. Fujii argues...

In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place-and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies-how leaders make their...

The eminent political activist examines the principles and strategies of imperial violence and propaganda from American colonization to the modern day. In this incisive study, Noam Chomsky demonstrates that "the great work of subjugation and conquest" has changed little over the years. Analyzing American policy and its consequences in Haiti, Latin America, Cuba, Indonesia, and even areas of the Third World developing in the United States, Chomsky...

World War II marked the apogee of industrialized "total war." Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unmatched...