100 books like Genocide as Social Practice

Katherine Verdery was on my PhD dissertation committee and her insights have long influenced my work.

This dry and ironically humorous book shows how corpses and statues do indeed have political “lives,” expanding readers’ awareness of who counts and what matters. The book gave me courage and inspiration to write a chapter about volunteer body collectors in Ukraine in my book. I explore how and why they cared about the human remains that the military had left behind.

In both books, care for the dead is life-affirming and helps establish new kinds of political order.

This novel about a girl’s flight from Rwanda is gripping.

She vividly captures how perceptions of risk are radically altered by war, how grief and trauma may take years to fully understand, and why we should not pity survivors but respect their strength. These are lessons I learned firsthand as a result of my research in Ukraine and that I also describe, in an expository style.

An important theme in this book, and one I explore at length in my own, is that once separated by politics or geography, family and friendships are difficult to re-knit. A lesson from the current war in Ukraine, then, is that infrastructure will be far easier to repair than the interpersonal ruins. Similarly, Wamariya eventually finds her parents, but everything has changed. 

Taylor’s book about the civil war is unlike any other.

Utilizing personal letters and archival documents, the book illuminates the conflicting loyalties to kin and country in civil war America. Taylor takes readers beyond the battlefield to show them the emotional lives of people who had family members fighting on opposite sides of the war.

I found a direct parallel among the people I lived and worked among during my fieldwork in Ukraine. Instead of archival materials, I use personal interviews to show how the contemporary geopolitical crisis over Ukraine is accompanied by a relational crisis when siblings, friends, parents, and their children can no longer communicate. 

Experiencing War is a gem because Christine Sylvester argues so compellingly that war can’t be fully apprehended without considering experiences in addition to the more abstract geopolitical levels of analysis.

It was my personal experience of PTSD in Ukraine that persuaded me I had enough situated knowledge to write Everyday War, and Sylvester’s book affirmed this experience as a starting point. Everyday War is calibrated to fill the gap in knowledge about the embodied and subjective dimensions of war that Sylvester identifies in her succinct survey of the literature on war.

James Waller’s scintillating book is for readers seeking answers to big questions. When studying the Holocaust and similar events, students invariably ask: how could human beings do such things to other people? Waller addresses this question in a tour-de-force that may be the best single book yet written on the “why” of genocide. His study is particularly compelling because he focuses not on race fanatics (Hitler, Himmler) nor ideological zealots (Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung) but on the rank-and-file, without whom the architects of genocide could never build their charnel empires in the first place. 

The second edition of his book is especially useful because he reviews both iconic and newer psychological theories of genocide perpetration. For Waller, the dynamics underlying genocide are complex. His key finding is that the potential for extreme violence resides within each person. Eschewing aberrationist theories that portray such violence as deviant, Waller invites us… show more.

If Epstein’s book, published in 1979, was the first expose about the commonalities among the children of the Holocaust, Hass’ book was the second. Hass succeeded in melding oral history, memoir, and his professions as a clinical psychologist and university professor. This book is helpful, not only to those of the second generation, but to mental health professionals, as well. It was also helpful to me, as it explained the unique, and often difficult, relationship between the survivor parents and their children.

I am passionate about the book because as a child of survivors, I have also had to grapple with the effects of my parents’ trauma. Of course, as a young child, I had no idea that my parents’ behaviors were special or different. It was only at an older age, I began noticing the differences between the atmosphere and attitudes in my home vs. those of my friends.… show more.

My 3rd grade teacher told me I had no artistic talent, and since I could not afford to hire an artist for my book- so I have no illustrations. Thus, I envy Eisenstein’s artistic talent in illustrating her memoir. Actually, I admire her double skills, as both a writer and an artist. Her sensitive, astute, and often humorous, analysis of her childhood with her Holocaust survivor parents was incredibly familiar to me. There were times I laughed hysterically, with tears in my eyes. Some of her anecdotes seemed as if they came right out of my own childhood recollection of family stories, such as her story about a gold wedding band that was hidden during dark days in a concentration camp, the parental silences or tears about the past, her “drug-like-addiction” to learning everything about the Holocaust, in order to envision her parents and their lives before the war,… show more.

There are far fewer studies in English on the Nazi occupation of Poland and the suffering and depredations that Poles faced during those more than five years of occupation.

This academic study does not merely cover the Holocaust in Poland but how the occupation affected millions of non-Jewish Poles as well. It also covers the intricate relationship that existed between Poles and Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belorussians, and how those ethnic differences turned into conflicts that affected the war and the occupation. It is a one-volume work that covers it all.

Back in the late ‘80s, I was at a small gathering of daughters of Holocaust survivors and next to me sat Elizabeth Rosner. As we each said something about our family’s history, Liz read a poem about her survivor father that vibrated with such resonance with me, and I knew I was in the presence of a gifted writer. Rosner went on to publish poetry and novels, and in this work of non-fiction that is lyrically and evocatively written, she confronts personal history and its aftermath while also exploring similar legacies of descendants of other atrocities that have left their multigenerational impact. Her “Alphabet of Inadequate Language” is alone worth the price of admission.

I found this book decades ago symbolically languishing on a remainders table in the back of Moe’s Bookstore in Berkeley. I nearly fainted when I read the title. Could this book be about me and others like me, members of a generation that wasn’t supposed to be born? This groundbreaking book, considered the Bible of children of Holocaust survivors, gives voice to the multigenerational impact of the Holocaust which we, the second generation, inherited directly from our parents who were the lucky few to survive while two-thirds of European Jewry was wiped out. As a psychotherapist, I have recommended this book to clients and their partners to better understand family dynamics, grief, trauma, resiliency, and determination to create a better world.