In Same River, Twice, one of Europe's leading novelists uses her personal experience to shed light on the personal experiences of others: ordinary women trapped in the crossfire of a great geopolitical game. --Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

It's one of those books that can truly change a reader's life. . . . A powerful, unforgettable read. --Andrey Kurkov, award-winning author of Grey Bees and The Silver Bone

Blending the journalistic rigor of Masha Gessen with the call to action of We Should All Be Feminists, a searing denunciation of Putin's Russia, revealing how modern Russia's history of weaponizing sexual violence against women plays a crucial role in its current strategy to retain political influence and dominance abroad

On March 22, 2023, the Swedish Academy organized a conference on threats to democracy and freedom of expression featuring a slate of distinguished speakers including Arundhati Roy, Timothy Snyder, and Sofi Oksanen. Oksanen's address--entitled Putin's War on Women-- would go on to spark such interest that the acclaimed Finnish writer felt compelled to return to it as the basis for a larger, more in-depth look at Putin's threat to women. The result is Same River, Twice, a devastating book-length essay that incisively builds on the themes and arguments first presented in her powerful speech.

During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Oksanen's great-aunt was arrested and brutally interrogated overnight. Left permanently traumatized by the experience, she would never speak again. Using her family story as a starting point, Oksanen launches an investigation into the systematic crimes that the Russian government has, for nearly a century, committed with impunity. From the Russian military's entry into Berlin in 1945 to its modern invasion of Ukraine, Russia has continually employed violence against women when combatting its enemies. Life for women in Putin's Russia is little better; gender equality is in decline, women are silenced by the legal system, and rape is used to humiliate victims, especially women in media.

Through Oksanen's sober analysis a disturbing picture emerges: under Putin, misogyny has become foundational to the state's power. It underpins the current regime, serves as a means of weaving international alliances, and forms an essential part of Russia's ongoing genocide in Ukraine, in turn posing a threat to the rights of women and minorities worldwide. As threats to democracy grow stronger across the globe, the powerful and timely Same River, Twice is a warning that cannot not be ignored.

Translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman

This collection of essays and articles, written between 2019 and 2024 for such outlets as The Daily Beast and The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), illuminates recent Russian international affairs through the lens of Moscow's propaganda tactics. For more than two decades, the Kremlin's agitators have been tasked to lay, in advance, the groundwork for various domestic and foreign actions by the regime of Vladimir Putin. Thus, Russian state-controlled media provides crucial clues for deciphering the--often sinister--goals that the government of Russia was and is planning to pursue abroad, from election interference to military invasions. The goal of the sum of these activities is the establishment of a new world order--with Russia at its helm. Before the large invasion of 24 February 2022, Russian state media portrayed the West as incapable of opposing Russian aggression. Putin's propagandists cheered for war against Ukraine, predicting it would be quick and victorious. Misreading the ability of the West to unite and miscalculating Russia's capabilities in confronting determined Ukrainians, Russia ended up in a quagmire of its own creation. In 2024, Putin's decorated propagandists face the possibility of future scrutiny and potential prosecutions for their proactive incitement of genocide. They unravel, along with the Kremlin, having to tell multiple conflicting stories and condemn the same players they used to lionize. Backed into the corner, they resort to nuclear threats and demand even more blood from Ukraine, whose only crime is its desire for democracy and freedom.

A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps.

For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of never again.

In this harrowing work based on archival records and interviews during travel to four continents, Andrea Pitzer reveals for the first time the chronological and geopolitical history of concentration camps. Beginning with 1890s Cuba, she pinpoints concentration camps around the world and across decades. From the Philippines and Southern Africa in the early twentieth century to the Soviet Gulag and detention camps in China and North Korea during the Cold War, camp systems have been used as tools for civilian relocation and political repression. Often justified as a measure to protect a nation, or even the interned groups themselves, camps have instead served as brutal and dehumanizing sites that have claimed the lives of millions.

Drawing from exclusive testimony, landmark historical scholarship, and stunning research, Andrea Pitzer unearths the roots of this appalling phenomenon, exploring and exposing the staggering toll of the camps: our greatest atrocities, the extraordinary survivors, and even the intimate, quiet moments that have also been part of camp life during the past century.

Masterly. --The New Yorker

A Smithsonian Magazine Best History Book of the Year

In End of Immunity, former President of the International Criminal Court Chile Eboe-Osuji probes the history and theory of the concept of immunity for heads of state, underscoring tribunal achievements, pointing out gaps in the existing framework of accountability and the hypocrisies that produced them, and offering workable solutions to the loopholes that government leaders still use to escape consequences today.

Bernhard Schreiber was born in 1942 in Stuttgart after his father died in action as an officer of the Luftwaffe. His investigations into the Holocaust led him to discover that many of the guiding principles of the Nazis had global appeal, both before and after World War II. Disturbed by the success of the new strategies pursued by proponents of eugenics, euthanasia, and population control, especially (but not exclusively) in the field of psychiatry, Schreiber decided he needed to distribute the findings of his research, which he did around 1974 in a book he called, The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World. This is a reprint of Schreiber's book created directly from a physical copy of his book as a reference.

A revelatory and wide-ranging series of interviews with award-winning writer Arundhati Roy, touching on US empire, Indian nationalism, a writer's work, and more.
As a novelist, Arundhati Roy is known for her lush language and intricate structure. As a political essayist, her prose is searching and fierce. All of these qualities shine through in the interviews collected here by David Barsamian.
This newly reissued and expanded edition, featuring interviews from 2001 to 2022 and a moving foreword by Naomi Klein, explores Roy's evolving political thought and commitments across the tumultuous twenty-first entry.
The Architecture of Modern Empire is a searing reckoning with the mechanics of power, in all its forms, and the role of imagination and creative expression in envisioning a radically different world.

Hamas, the Palestinian government organization ruling the Gaza Strip, burst into American consciousness with their horrific attack on innocent Israelis on October 7th, 2023. Nonetheless, most Americans are unfamiliar with this group or know little about them.

This book attempts to fill that void by giving a history of Hamas and explaining their motivations, not just for the October 7 attack, but with the nation of Israel, in general.

Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles.

By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.

From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist--an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war.

In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she's never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars--the bang-bang war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle.

Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice.

We have made significant progress in international women's rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn't matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook.

In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience--so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

From Schmelt Camp to Little Auschwitz Blechhammer's Role in the Holocaust is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer's role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived.

Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp's abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and ordinary civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners' daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies.

Refreshingly candid . . . Get off Instagram and read this book. --Sacha Baron Cohen

From the dynamic head of ADL, an impassioned argument about the terrifying path that America finds itself on today--and how we can save ourselves.

It's almost impossible to imagine that unbridled hate and systematic violence could come for us or our families. But it has happened in our lifetimes in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. And it could happen here.

Today, as CEO of the storied ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), Jonathan Greenblatt has made it his personal mission to demonstrate how antisemitism, racism, and other insidious forms of intolerance can destroy a society, taking root as quiet prejudices but mutating over time into horrific acts of brutality. In this urgent book, Greenblatt sounds an alarm, warning that this age-old trend is gathering momentum in the United States--and that violence on an even larger, more catastrophic scale could be just around the corner.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Drawing on ADL's decades of experience in fighting hate through investigative research, education programs, and legislative victories as well as his own personal story and his background in business and government, Greenblatt offers a bracing primer on how we--as individuals, as organizations, and as a society--can strike back against hate. Just because it could happen here, he shows, does not mean that the unthinkable is inevitable.

Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Shortlist

Germans remember the Nazi past so that it may never happen again. But how has the abstract vow to remember translated into concrete action to prevent new genocides abroad?

As reports of mass killings in Bosnia spread in the middle of 1995, Germans faced a dilemma. Should the Federal Republic deploy its military to the Balkans to prevent a genocide, or would departing from postwar Germany's pacifist tradition open the door to renewed militarism? In short, when Germans said never again, did they mean never again Auschwitz or never again war?

Looking beyond solemn statements and well-meant monuments, Andrew I. Port examines how the Nazi past shaped German responses to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda--and further, how these foreign atrocities recast Germans' understanding of their own horrific history. In the late 1970s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge received relatively little attention from a firmly antiwar public that was just discovering the Holocaust. By the 1990s, the genocide of the Jews was squarely at the center of German identity, a tectonic shift that inspired greater involvement in Bosnia and, to a lesser extent, Rwanda. Germany's increased willingness to use force in defense of others reflected the enthusiastic embrace of human rights by public officials and ordinary citizens. At the same time, conservatives welcomed the opportunity for a more active international role involving military might--to the chagrin of pacifists and progressives at home.

Making the lessons, limits, and liabilities of politics driven by memories of a troubled history harrowingly clear, Never Again is a story with deep resonance for any country confronting a dark past.

This is the first book to argue comprehensively that unless we destroy the legal and political basis for the corporation, we are unlikely to reverse the decline of the eco-system, and therefore we will hasten the end of the species.

A Washington Post notable nonfiction book of 2020

I You We Them is a uniquely gripping journey around the landscapes of mass murder. --Philippe Sands, author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity

A Spectator (UK) Best Book of 2019

A landmark historical investigation into crimes against humanity and the nature of evil

Vast and revelatory, Dan Gretton's I You We Them is an unprecedented study of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity: the desk killers who ordered and directed some of the worst atrocities of the modern era. From Albert Speer's complicity in Nazi barbarism to Royal Dutch Shell's role in the murders of the Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the rest of the Ogoni Nine, Gretton probes the depths of the figure who, by giving orders, uses paper or a phone or a computer to kill, instead of a gun.

Over the past twenty years, Gretton has interviewed survivors and perpetrators, and pored over archives and thousands of pages of testimony. His insight into the psychology of the desk killer is contextualized by the journey he took to penetrate it. Woven into the narrative are his contemplative interludes--perspectives gleaned during walks in the woods, reminiscences about a lost love, and considerations of timeless moral conundrums. The result is a genre-bending work steeped as much in personal reflection as it is in literature and historical and psychological illumination.

A synthesis of history, reportage, and memoir, I You We Them is the first volume of a groundbreaking journal of discovery that bears witness to and reckons with the largest and most pressing questions before humanity.

A powerful story of war in our time, of love of country, the experience of tragedy, and a platoon at the center of it all.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly nineteen-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the U.S. Department of Defense's quest to build the world's most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

First Platoon is an American saga that illuminates a transformation of society made possible by this new technology. Part war story, part legal drama, it is about identity in the age of identification. About humanity--physical bravery, trauma, PTSD, a yearning to do right and good--in the age of biometrics, which reduce people to iris scans, fingerprint scans, voice patterning, detection by odor, gait, and more. And about the power of point of view in a burgeoning surveillance state.

Based on hundreds of formerly classified documents, FOIA requests, and exclusive interviews, First Platoon is an investigative exposé by a master chronicler of government secrets. First Platoon reveals a post-9/11 Pentagon whose identification machines have grown more capable than the humans who must make sense of them. A Pentagon so powerful it can cover up its own internal mistakes in pursuit of endless wars. And a people at its mercy, in its last moments before a fundamental change so complete it might be impossible to take back.

Aram Andonian did a service to humanity by tracking down Naim Bey and acquiring primary sources related to the Armenian genocide. During the genocide, Naim Bey, a Turk, had been the chief secretary of the Deportations Committee of Aleppo. By virtue of this station, Naim Bey was not just an eyewitness to the events that unfolded around him, but someone who was privy to the actual telegrams that carried the orders for the brutal extermination of the Armenians. The reproduction of these documents, telegrams, and decrees are valuable additions to the historical record. Naturally, there is controversy about the authenticity of these records. In this edition, the reader is able to assess the authenticity for themselves.

This edition is not an OCR (optical character recognition) scan, nor is it a facsimile. It has been carefully reconstructed from a facsimile of the original 1920 manuscript, striving to ensure accuracy. As such it incorporates corrections listed in the 1964 reprint of The Memoirs by the Armenian Historical Research Association. The 1964 reprint included other photos of the genocide which had not originally been included by Aram Andonian, but are appended to this edition, as a vivid, visual testimony to what happened to the Armenians about fifty years prior to the reprint.

For a century, the Palestinian people have endured the brutal consequences of Western-backed Zionist settler colonialism. From relentless ethnic cleansing to mass population expulsions, the ancient land of Palestine has witnessed unspeakable horrors at the hands of Zionists. At the heart of this turmoil lies the Gaza concentration camp, where a densely populated community is being reduced to rubble by Apartheid Israel.

The world watches in silence despite over 100,000 people killed, missing, or injured in the first 100 days alone of relentless Israeli violence. The core principles of Humanity - Kindness and Truth - are rejected by those who seek to erase the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants from their own land.

This book sheds light on the ongoing Palestinian genocide, exposing the atrocities ignored by the West. It is a call to action against the violent regime of Apartheid Israel, and its unwavering support from the US and its allies. Will humanity stand by as Gazans face complete expulsion from their homeland, or will the truth prevail in the face of injustice?

Discover the untold story of resilience, resistance, and hope in the midst of darkness. The time for change and full human rights for Palestinians is now.

Written by internationally-known 'comfort women' scholars and redress activists, this book critically examines and evaluates the erroneous claim that Japanese and Korean 'comfort women' (KCW) were voluntary prostitutes with labor contracts, rather than sexual slaves. It also critically evaluates many unsubstantiated arguments and unjustifiable criticisms of the redress movement led by the Korean Council.

Genocide and its tactics have been making something of a comeback, and it is all too often the victims in one generation who become the perpetrators in the next, transmuting never again into a rallying cry for the next act of mass violence. Few can keep their hearts open amid an endless fusillade of sorrow, so most just deny it is happening. But all too many find themselves eager to get in on the action and it is easier now than ever before. The mass murder of innocent civilians has long brutalized both victims and perpetrators alike, but now it does the same to its innumerable witnesses, standing transfixed before unspeakable crimes. Videos of the killings and human rights violations inure us to violence, while real time debates on social media make participants of us all. It is a globalized war from below, for the hearts and minds of humanity and the decency of the world order, which is dissolving before our eyes.

This book is a panoramic excursion through the murderous new milieu, which ranges across Israel and Palestine, Syria and Iraq, Bosnia and Burma, Yemen and Nigeria. It is a vivid dissection of violence and a probing exploration of its causes, an erudite inquiry into the legacy of collective trauma and a magisterial overview of the new brutality peering through the cracks of a disintegrating international order. Sweeping in scope and striking in its originality, it will open your eyes and awaken your moral intelligence to the subterranean depths of ethnonational animosity today.

Theo Horesh is a freelance journalist and the author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind and The Inner Climate: Global Warming from the Inside Out, a series of dialogues with leading climate thinkers, like George Lakoff, Frances Moore Lapp , Paul Ehrlich, and Peter Senge.