A cogent, thorough historical study of the gathering global momentum in holding state officials accountable for human-rights abuses, from Nuremberg to Guantánamo.
The trend toward human-rights activism throughout the 20th century, galvanized especially around opposition to the repressive military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, has created what Sikkink (Political Science/Univ. of Minnesota) views as a deeply hopeful “justice cascade.” Oriented in her research toward Latin America, the author concentrates mainly on the emergent groups that exposed abuses in those countries, which in turn empowered others to create “truth commissions” in the wake of violent official abuses, such as South Africa and the former Yugoslavia. Despite the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II, which put in place the model for state accountability, the enforcement of human-rights abuses lost steam mainly because the criminal leaders themselves still claimed immunity. In Greece and Portugal by the mid ’70s, however, domestic courts held unprecedented trials of military personnel for crimes committed during their previous military dictatorships—unlike in Spain, where the passage of time and the Amnesty Law of 1977 blocked persecution of abuses perpetrated during General Franco’s four-decade dictatorship. Human-rights organizations in support of the “disappeared” of Argentina ensured that Raúl Alfonsín’s democratic government held trials—in turn setting off an outcry for accountability in neighboring Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia, making possible the extradition arrest of General Pinochet in 1998 and paving the way for the creation of the International Criminal Court and other important checks. Sikkink structures her fairly academic but highly readable study in three parts: the emergence of the zeitgeist, spurred by the American opposition to the Vietnam War in the late ’60s; the diffusion of the ideas of accountability; and the impact of deterring world leaders from criminal activity—e.g., Bush administration officials being held accountable for torture cases at secret detention centers. A distinguished work involving a significant marshalling of statistics and evidence that signals enormous hope for humanity in the coming century.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-07993-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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