Thoughtful reportage and analysis from a distinguished jurist and witness of the prosecution.
South African judge Goldstone, drawing on his experiences investigating the causes of political unrest during South Africa’s transition to democracy and as chief prosecutor of Yugoslavian and Rwandan war crimes, offers a cogent memoir of those times as well as a brief for supporting an international criminal court.
Goldstone’s accounts (based on the Castle Lectures he delivered at Yale in 1997 and 1998) form an argument for the punishment of those who commit crimes against humanity in times of war or oppression. As such they reflect the legal and moral case for such prosecutions, but they scant the political and military problems of making an international criminal court universally acceptable and effective. After a brief sketch of his background and his anti-apartheid credentials, the author goes on to describe his work as head of the Goldstone Commission on Public Violence and Intimidation. It was a position that brought him both death-threats and international attention: the latter led to his subsequent appointments as a war-crimes investigator. As head of the Commission, he successfully investigated the sources of violence (specifically, the members of a covert police force) that threatened to destabilize South Africa during its move to democracy. In 1994 he took up his position as Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav tribunal at The Hague. While noting that, prior to WWII, nations (not individuals) were the subjects of international law, he goes on to describe his experiences with the tribunal; his not-always-easy relations with the UN; the indictments of Karazdic and Mladic that he suggests may have helped the Dayton Accords; and his satisfaction, when he moved on to Rwanda, that the tribunal handed down in 1998 the first conviction for systematic rape as a war crime.
Thoughtful reportage and analysis from a distinguished jurist and witness of the prosecution.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-300-08205-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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