100 books like Justice in the Balkans

By John Hagan,

Here are 100 books that Justice in the Balkans fans have personally recommended if you like Justice in the Balkans. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

Antony Polonsky Author Of The Jews in Poland and Russia: A Short History

From my list on Jews of East-Central Europe during the Holocaust.

Why am I passionate about this?

I came to England on a Rhodes Scholarship from South Africa in 1961 and have been a Professor at the London School of Economics and Brandeis University. I am the Chief Historian of the Global Educational Outreach Project at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. My interests are the politics of Eastern Europe, the history of the Jews, and the conflict in the Middle East. I have witnessed the transition from communist rule to democracy in Poland and the end of apartheid in South Africa. There are growing threats to democracy and political pluralism, and I very much hope that these can be successfully resisted. 

Antony's book list on Jews of East-Central Europe during the Holocaust

Antony Polonsky Why did Antony love this book?

In this remarkable combination of memoir and scholarly work, Philippe Sands, a British lawyer actively engaged in support of human rights, combines the story of his own Eastern European Jewish family with those of two jurists who forged the legal framework for the Nuremberg trials: Hersch Lauterpacht, who developed the concept of “crimes against humanity,” and Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term “genocide” to describe what was taking place. Both men and Sands’s maternal grandfather hailed from Lwów, part of southern Poland before the war, and now Lviv, in Ukraine. 

All had relatives murdered in the Holocaust. They were determined to prosecute those responsible and establish an international framework for the protection of human rights and played an important part in the trials at Nuremberg. 

By Philippe Sands,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked East West Street as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017

SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER

When he receives an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, international lawyer Philippe Sands begins a journey on the trail of his family's secret history. In doing so, he uncovers an astonishing series of coincidences that lead him halfway across the world, to the origins of international law at the Nuremberg trial. Interweaving the stories of the two Nuremberg prosecutors (Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin) who invented the crimes or genocide and crimes against humanity, the Nazi governor responsible for…


Book cover of Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment

Judith Armatta Author Of Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

From my list on war crimes trials and international justice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a tired activist and recovering attorney. My professional focus on violence and humanity’s response to it began when, as a seven-year-old, the nuns at my Catholic school showed us newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. This led me to adopt as my life’s guiding principle Julian Beck’s admonition “to redeem our share of the universal cruelty.” After 20 years in the U.S. Violence Against Women Movement, I absconded to the former Yugoslavia and found myself in the middle of a war during which I ran a war crimes documentation project (memoir in progress). I later reported on the international war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

Judith's book list on war crimes trials and international justice

Judith Armatta Why did Judith love this book?

Kochavi’s book gave me a more complete and nuanced understanding of how the Nuremberg war crimes court came to be, how defendants were selected, and what law to apply. Based on copious research, Kochavi uncovers the inside story of how the Allies ultimately agreed to establish an international court to hold Nazi officials accountable for mass atrocities instead of summarily executing them, which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin favored. Initial U.S. and British resistance to including crimes against German nationals (extermination of the Jews among them) was overcome by strong public, especially Jewish, opposition.

By Arieh J. Kochavi,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Prelude to Nuremberg as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Between November 1945 and October 1946, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried some of the most notorious political and military figures of Nazi Germany. The issue of punishing war criminals was widely discussed by the leaders of the Allied nations, however, well before the end of the war. As Arieh Kochavi demonstrates, the policies finally adopted, including the institution of the Nuremberg trials, represented the culmination of a complicated process rooted in the domestic and international politics of the war years.Drawing on extensive research, Kochavi painstakingly reconstructs the deliberations that went on in Washington and London at a time…


Book cover of The Nuremberg Legacy: How the Nazi War Crimes Trials Changed the Course of History

Judith Armatta Author Of Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

From my list on war crimes trials and international justice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a tired activist and recovering attorney. My professional focus on violence and humanity’s response to it began when, as a seven-year-old, the nuns at my Catholic school showed us newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. This led me to adopt as my life’s guiding principle Julian Beck’s admonition “to redeem our share of the universal cruelty.” After 20 years in the U.S. Violence Against Women Movement, I absconded to the former Yugoslavia and found myself in the middle of a war during which I ran a war crimes documentation project (memoir in progress). I later reported on the international war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

Judith's book list on war crimes trials and international justice

Judith Armatta Why did Judith love this book?

I found Ehrenfreund’s book compelling because he applied his legal expertise as a lawyer and judge to what he personally witnessed at the trial. His research included numerous conversations with Germans who lived through the Nazi regime. I also valued his insights as they were informed by his personal journey to learn his grandfather’s fate many years after he disappeared into the Holocaust. While Ehrenfreund reveals how U.S. law heavily influenced the law applied at Nuremberg, I found his analysis of the trial’s subsequent influence on U.S. law revealing. For example, Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was impacted by the racial hatred that underlies the crimes of the Holocaust in Brown v. Board of Education, The U.S. Court’s school desegregation decision.

By Norbert Ehrenfreund,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Nuremberg Legacy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Sixty years have passed since the Nuremberg trials of the major Nazi war criminals, but that event still stands as the foundation of international justice. Nuremberg not only ignited a revolution in international law but affected domestic law as well with its simple but profound principle that every individual accused of crime is entitled to a full and fair hearing. This book reveals how the precedents set at Nuremberg have affected human rights, race relations, medical practice, big business and even Germany's post-war development. It also examines the Nuremberg trials' influence on the modern war crimes trials of tyrants like…


Book cover of The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America

Judith Armatta Author Of Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

From my list on war crimes trials and international justice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a tired activist and recovering attorney. My professional focus on violence and humanity’s response to it began when, as a seven-year-old, the nuns at my Catholic school showed us newsreels of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. This led me to adopt as my life’s guiding principle Julian Beck’s admonition “to redeem our share of the universal cruelty.” After 20 years in the U.S. Violence Against Women Movement, I absconded to the former Yugoslavia and found myself in the middle of a war during which I ran a war crimes documentation project (memoir in progress). I later reported on the international war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

Judith's book list on war crimes trials and international justice

Judith Armatta Why did Judith love this book?

I’m drawn to inconvenient truths and Canadian Erna Paris reveals them in exceptionally readable prose. Paris discusses why it took more than fifty years to establish a permanent International Criminal Court to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. She examines the reasons for U.S. opposition to the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002, identifies U.S. officials who worked to undermine efforts to develop the ICC, exposes the real reasons they did so, and debunks the official position of protecting US soldiers.

By Erna Paris,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Sun Climbs Slow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A powerful investigation of the story and individuals behind America’s refusal to acknowledge international law and an inquiry into the urgent role of international criminal justice from the award-winning, bestselling author of Long Shadows.

In this groundbreaking investigation, Erna Paris explores the history of global justice, the politics behind America’s opposition to the creation of a permanent international criminal court, and the implications for the world at large.

At the end of the twentieth century, two extraordinary events took place. The first was the end of the Cold War, which left the world with a single empire that dominated global…


Book cover of The Reader

Frank Trentmann Author Of Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022

From my list on the transformation of Germany since Adolf Hitler.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian, and I am fascinated by the interplay and tensions between our moral and material lives. In my books, I try to recover how people in earlier periods thought about good and bad and why they acted the way they did. I try to understand how norms and customs change over time and how we came to think of our own as “normal,” which was all but normal not so long ago. I do not believe historians should play being prophets, but I do believe history can help us make better sense of the present.

Frank's book list on the transformation of Germany since Adolf Hitler

Frank Trentmann Why did Frank love this book?

There are plenty of books about memory politics and Germans’ slow and difficult way of reckoning with their evil past. What I really like about this book is how it brings to life these complex moral challenges through the story of a relationship between a younger man and an older woman who turns out to have been a camp guard under the Nazis.

The novel is about the tensions between love, responsibility, and forgiveness, but above all, it is about the difficulty of being German after the Nazis.  

By Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Reader as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' [Independent on Saturday]

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems.

Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much…


Book cover of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

Michael S. Bryant Author Of Confronting the "Good Death": Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953

From my list on pondering the worst of the Nazis’ crimes.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve had a life-long interest in genocide dating back to my teenage years, when I read Simon Wiesenthal’s book The Murderers Among Us. Wiesenthal introduced me to the idea that governments sometimes murdered innocent people and could elude justice for their crimes. The question of human evil interacted with my theological interest in the problem of evil generally. Both genocide scholars and theologians were posing similar questions: how could people or God permit the occurrence of wanton evil when it was in their power to avoid it? And what should we do about genocide after it has happened? These questions launched my research into genocide and continue to fuel my study of this topic.

Michael's book list on pondering the worst of the Nazis’ crimes

Michael S. Bryant Why did Michael love this book?

In 2019 I published a review of Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings in the journal HistoryThe review may have been the most laudatory I’ve written. Fulbrook’s study of the Holocaust and its noxious aftereffects lingers with me today. I’ve come to think of Reckonings as the War and Peace of Holocaust histories. Like Tolstoy’s epic, it paints on a sprawling canvas, exhausting the writer’s palette to portray the Holocaust as a searing multi-generational phenomenon. Reckonings does not approach the Shoah as most writers of the Holocaust do, namely, as a monumental but time-limited event. Fulbrook conceives of the Holocaust as a cancer that blights the victims and their families into the second and third generations. The radioactive fallout of the Shoah continues to the present day, poisoning people’s lives so deeply that no human response is adequate to deal with it. She upholds the tragedy of the Holocaust by refusing…

By Mary Fulbrook,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Reckonings as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences
among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss…


Book cover of Mother Night

Jeff Berney Author Of The Fall of Faith

From my list on feed your dark side.

Why am I passionate about this?

Even as a boy, I could see (or maybe just sense) the darkness that resides just below the surface of this otherwise pleasant world. We all have stories, and the ones we hold closest to ourselves are often the darkest. Those are the stories that fascinate me the most. What are the limits of man’s menace? What causes seemingly normal people to snap? To turn on their fellow man? I could do one of two things with this fascination: become a sociopath (perhaps psychopath) or an author of dark, twisted, twisty tales. As you know, I chose the latter. 

Jeff's book list on feed your dark side

Jeff Berney Why did Jeff love this book?

If you’ve read any of my novels, you know I like my protagonists to be flawed. The more morally complex the main character, the better, in my opinion. And how can you get more morally questionable than an American who becomes a propagandist for the Nazi party during WWII? But wait. Is he a Nazi? Or is he just playing a part?

Another thing I love is when genre fiction has a larger moral theme that runs through it. What can I say? I don’t like to be preached at, but I do prefer stories with a strong point of view (whether I believe in it or not). And what bigger question can a book tackle than the one Vonnegut plays with in this book? Are we what we pretend to be? If you’re a WWII buff, or even if you just enjoy peeking into the darkest reaches of human…

By Kurt Vonnegut,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Mother Night as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time

Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

“A great artist.”—Cincinnati Enquirer

“A shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter .…


Book cover of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Naomi Roht-Arriaza Author Of The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights

From my list on bringing dictators and evil men to justice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in part in Chile, and when the Pinochet dictatorship started killing and torturing people, I wanted to do something about it. Years later, as a professor of international law, I helped countries figure out what to do after mass atrocities. Seeing how trials in other countries – or in international criminal courts – could break through barriers and make it possible to bring those who killed, tortured, or disappeared thousands of people to justice gave me hope. I wanted to tell the stories of the brave people who overcame the odds to do justice, in a readable and exciting way that also explained the legal and political issues involved. 

Naomi's book list on bringing dictators and evil men to justice

Naomi Roht-Arriaza Why did Naomi love this book?

The grandmama of human rights-related trial accounts, and for good reason. Arendt covered the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the 1960s. Eichmann had been living in Argentina, and was kidnapped and taken to Israel, where he was tried and condemned for his role in the Holocaust. Arendt raises profound questions about the value of trials in the face of overwhelming evil, about how trials structure narratives, and about memory. Still issues we grapple with today.

By Hannah Arendt,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Eichmann in Jerusalem as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'A profound and documented analysis ... Bound to stir our minds and trouble our consciences' Chicago Tribune

Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript commenting on the controversy that arose over her book. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative - a meticulous and unflinching look at one…


Book cover of The Stone Fields: Love and Death in the Balkans

Kyoko Mori Author Of The Dream of Water: A Memoir

From my list on travel memoirs for those who love to wander.

Why am I passionate about this?

Although two of my nonfiction books—The Dream of Water and Polite Lies—are about traveling from the American Midwest to my native country of Japan, I'm not a traveler by temperament. I long to stay put in one place. Chimney swifts cover the distance between North America and the Amazon basin every fall and spring. I love to stand in the driveway of my brownstone to watch them. That was the last thing Katherine Russell Rich and I did together in what turned out to be the last autumn of her life before the cancer she’d been fighting came back. Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, along with the four other books I’m recommending, expresses an indomitable spirit of adventure. 

Kyoko's book list on travel memoirs for those who love to wander

Kyoko Mori Why did Kyoko love this book?

In the summer of 1996, Ms. Brkic joined a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team in Eastern Bosnia to excavate the mass graves of the Srebrenica massacre. Ms. Brkic, who grew up in Northern Virginia, had family connections in the Balkans. Her grandmother, Andelka, was from Herzegovina, in a small village among limestone hills. The family survived the Second World War and the Communist takeover of their country. Her father escaped from Yugoslavia in 1959 and settled in America. 

Stone Fields juxtaposes the family story with the story of the summer Ms. Brkic spent on the forensic team in Tuzla and with her friends and relatives in Zagreb. The author portrays the many ways that people can lose their homes—through war, genocide, political oppression, emigration, family discord—with heartbreaking clarity, always aware of the dignity, as well as the tragedy, of the survivors’ lives.

By Courtney Angela Brkic,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Stone Fields as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia. She was drawn there by her family history - her father is Croatian - and she was fluent in the language. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she reimagines her family's own catastrophic history in Yugoslavia. Alternating chapters explore her grandmother's life: her childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood and imprisonment during the Second World War for hiding her Jewish lover. The movement throughout the book between the past and the present has a…


Book cover of The Distortions

Beth Castrodale Author Of The Inhabitants

From my list on confronting trauma or loss.

Why am I passionate about this?

All of my novels explore, in some way, how the characters are affected by trauma or loss, and how they respond to these difficulties over time. This comes partly from my impatience with the notion of “closure” and with the idea that we can ever truly find it after a traumatic event or a significant loss. I’m drawn to fiction and nonfiction that doesn’t shy away from the messiness of finding a way to live with these difficulties, or trying to. In addition to writing fiction, I’ve spent nearly ten years recommending novels and story collections through my Small Press Picks website.

Beth's book list on confronting trauma or loss

Beth Castrodale Why did Beth love this book?

Although the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) aren’t always addressed head-on in this sweeping and revelatory story collection, they haunt nearly every tale in the book. Collectively, the stories shed light on the varied human costs of war, and on how they can reverberate across time. The book has inspired me to learn more about the Yugoslav Wars, and it feels especially relevant in light of the Russia-Ukraine war, which also seems destined to have deep and lasting repercussions. As I read the stories, I considered how immersing us in the lives of those affected by wars can bring home these repercussions so much more effectively than, say, news accounts. I admire the breadth of this collection, which also includes thought-provoking stories about challenged romantic relationships, making art, and more.

By Christopher Linforth,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Distortions as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In The Distortions we glimpse a pageant of characters struggling to understand their lives after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Scarred by the last major war fought on European soil, the women and men of these stories question what such a violent past can mean in comfortable, capitalistic modern Europe. From London and Brooklyn and Norway, to the Blue Grotto of Biševo and the war-torn fields of Slavonia, this collection blends Yugoslavian and American stories of great emotional and geographical amplitude.



5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in the Yugoslav Wars, atrocities, and the Netherlands?

Atrocities 32 books
The Netherlands 86 books