100 books like The Girl Who Smiled Beads

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.

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. 

If you have ever wondered what personal relationships have to do with war, read Genocide as a Social Practice by Daniel Feierstein.

This author explains the social mechanics of genocide by comparing various cases. He argues genocide doesn’t just destroy human bodies, it destroys relationships as a means to the ultimate goal of social reorganization. This is one of very few books I brought with me during my fieldwork in Ukraine, where it accompanied me on cross-country train travel.

As I argue in my book, and like genocide in other places, Ukrainian society is being reconfigured in part through loss and death, but also relationships.

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.

The author, a Tutsi genocide survivor, was once a young Rwandan politician who deeply admired Paul Kagame and seemed destined for prominent public office. Instead, from his position as parliamentary speaker, he watched as his hero steadily emasculated the judiciary, undermined the country’s Hutu president – a symbol of ethnic reconciliation - and sabotaged parliamentary democracy itself,  eventually fleeing the country when his own life was threatened. His book not only offers great insights into the workings of village life in a tiny African country traumatized by its violent past, it’s a step-by-step analysis of how a dictatorship takes cynical, relentless hold.

We can learn a lot about urban refugees from works of fiction. This short story is a tragic tale of Boniface Louis R. Kuseremane, a Rwandese prince, who finds himself in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The story does well to remind us that refugees come from all backgrounds and how quickly support and wealth can disappear. Nairobi initially exists as a stop-off on route to continued comforts in Europe, but the protagonist finds himself trapped on a downward spiral as his social and material privileges slip away.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is most well known for her beautifully written novels Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, but long before these, her short story Weight of Whispers won the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.

This influential book on the Rwandan genocide presents a nuanced analysis of how extreme violence can arise in postcolonial contexts. Through this and other writings, Mamdani has made important contributions to the study of violence, imperialism, and postcolonialism.

Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire is the highest-ranking military officer who has come out and publicly talked about his psychiatric struggles with flashbacks, depression, and suicidal thoughts. This is his story as the commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda in 1993-94. Woven into his narrative is an account of the onset of traumatic stress and of his reactions to what psychiatry refers to as PTSD. This is a brutally honest book by a high-ranking military officer about the unspeakable inhumanity of civil war and the terrible vulnerability of international peacemakers. It is a story of one of the walking wounded who survived the genocide as a moral witness.  

So many books have been written about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda since this came out, but for me it still effortlessly holds its own: clear, accessible, immensely insightful in the way it traces cause and effect. Make sure you buy the second edition, though, as French historian Prunier revised some key views over the years, including his opinion on who brought down the plane in which two African presidents died – the incident that triggered the genocide. The book is the perfect companion piece for Prunier’s follow-up tome, which pans back to examine not just Rwanda but the entire Great Lakes region during the turbulent post-genocide years: “From Genocide to Continental War. The “Congolese” Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa.” 

This is a harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda told by one of its survivors, Imaculee llibagiza, after Hutu soldiers murdered her father, mother, and two brothers during a killing spree that took the lives of a million Rwandans.

In a fight for survival, Imaculee and seven other women took refuge in a 3’ by 3’ bathroom hidden behind a wardrobe in a pastor’s home. As the machete-wielding gunmen continued hunting for more victims, Imaculee and the women remained in their cloister in silence. Her  91 days in hiding is a testimony of endurance and resilience in the face of unrestrained evil.

When everyone you love is dead, and everything you love is lost, how do you go on? Imaculee found the answer in faith, love, forgiveness, and optimism. It is a haunting story of an ordinary woman and earthly mortal forced into an enlightening spiritual experience with the… show more.