Carpenter details how humanitarian advocacy groups set priorities that lead to strategic choices and practical agendas that overlook -- indeed, at times, consciously ignore the half million children today whose mothers were raped or exploited during war.
This ground-level look does not tell one much about the political activity in Stasi's upper echelons, or even at a lower level in the big cities, but it does convey the stupefying preoccupation with recruiting informants and then harassing the average Stasi agent to get more, often useless, information from them.
For Naimark, labeling Stalin's mass killing “genocide” entails a rigorous exegesis of the concept itself -- its history, legal complexities, boundaries, and universe. This is a small book that places a large exclamation point on the most incriminatingly tragic dimension of Soviet history.
Frazier visited or crossed Siberia five times over 16 years -- summer and winter. Readers will come away with a profoundly renewed respect for a warm, soft bed and other creature comforts, but only after accompanying Frazier vicariously on a truly remarkable set of journeys.
The author's focus is not on the Russian mind writ large or even the mind of the ruling elite but rather on that of the generations of academic Orientalists from the eighteenth century on.
Bullough vividly conveys what remains of the Cricasians' historical memory and cultural legacy, weaving their story into a detailed history of what actually happened.
