83 books like The Rabbit House

This was the first book I read when researching Argentina’s military dictatorship over twenty years ago. It was gifted to me by the head of the graduate program in international affairs at The New School. It explores the use of language in the context of the human rights atrocities that occurred during this dark period of Argentina’s history.

Marguerite Feitlowitz's marrying of investigative narrative with human storytelling makes the work accessible and richly informative.

Alicia Partnoy was one of the estimated thirty thousand people captured during Argentina’s dictatorship. An Argentine poet, author, human rights activist, translator, and professor, she was torn from her home—and away from her baby daughter, who was left behind with relatives—in 1977.

This is a literary account of the subsequent months she spent in a clandestine prison in Bahia Blanca called La Escuelita, where she and other prisoners were subject to torture and abuse at the hands of the junta. Translated from Spanish, this is a survivor’s memoir. I loved the poetic and near-spiritual explorations of these harrowing experiences. Alicia has since been reunited with her daughter, providing invaluable inspiration and insight for my book.

This is one of my favorite books about the work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In it, Arditti quickly summarizes the historical backdrop of the dictatorship (within fifty pages), then provides a touching, thorough, and informative account of the grandmothers’ work, often using their own words.

She showcases obstacles and milestones—from ‘The Catholic Church’ to ‘The Grandmother's Gift to Science’—in easily digestible sections, capturing decades of tenacious search efforts and the emotional result when found grandchildren are reunited with their biological families.

This book appealed to my love of feminist theory and cultural studies. It explores gender and nationalism in the context of Argentine identity between 1976 and 1983.

Diana Taylor examines military tactics, geography, theatre, campaign propaganda, and the feminization of the enemy—with quite a bit of research on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—and examines the way images, myths, and desires shape a collective narrative.

The oldest book on my list, it is still my go-to for understanding and writing about how human rights are understood by activists and organizations working in complex conditions of ongoing conflict and violence.

The stories Tate tells are compelling and a reminder amid the country’s continued grappling with this period of violence of what has been at stake and the uphill battles activists have faced for decades.

This was the first real effort to bring together a picture of the whole story of the global Communist movement and the many famines it created. It covers the whole-scale of the misery in regimes in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, Russia, India, China, and southeast Asia. It’s a lot of ground to cover but the narrative does not flag. Although the opening of the archives had produced more information, this is still a very impressive book however sobering it might be.

Unscrupulous leaders often stir up mob violence in service to their own ambitions, taking offense at slights that they could choose to shrug off. George charges such groups as the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, the Front Pembela Islam in Indonesia, and ACT! for America in the United States with pursuing power, money, and attention by shrieking that a blasphemous cartoon, a multicultural textbook, or a new house of worship threatens the dominant religion. “Explosions of righteous indignation and incitement are more than the hysteria of mad mullahs and enraged mobs,” argues George. He reminds us to look past the young men throwing rocks and find the movement leaders who stand to gain.

This book showed me in a way I’d never seen before what life was like for an imprisoned bureaucrat in Stalin-era Russia. The author proved to me that through undeniable detail and unflinching sincerity, you can show an unsettling reality that powerful authorities have worked tirelessly to conceal.

Found within the book’s pages are poignant anecdotes, lessons, and reflective moments that made me question the very concepts of what a person is capable of doing and enduring under extreme circumstances. I could not get the chapter “The Buddha’s Smile” out of my head, and I don’t think I ever will.

On a cold winter night in 1960 the families of Dachuan village were forced out of their homes to make way for the waters of a huge new dam. Some managed to retrieve a few bones from the family graves to take to their new homes. But the ancestral temple that had been at the heart of village life and identity for centuries was lost to the rising waters. 

For decades Maoist policy suppressed all religious expression in China, but the reforms of the 1980s saw many forms of religious revival, including the triumphant reconstruction of Dachuan’s Confucius temple, its rituals, ethics, and ancestral spirit tablets. 

Jing’s book is an outstanding study of social memory, its powers of resistance to crisis and oppression, and its mobilization as a resource to rebuild community and history. A unique window onto the travails of modern China, it also invites us to reflect on… show more.

Alison Pargeter is a leading member of the new generation of Western scholars focused on North Africa and the Middle East in general and Libya in particular.

An Arabist, she draws on original research and field interviews to offer fresh perspectives and nuanced views not found elsewhere. Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi is an account of the Qaddafi regime from its creation in September 1969 until the death of Qaddafi in October 2011.

Throughout the book, Pargeter disentangles involved, complicated issues and events and explores them in lucid, engaging, and approachable prose.

She concludes her excellent book with a few thoughts on the legacy of the Qaddafi regime, remarks some reviewers found unduly pessimistic.

Unfortunately, the concerns she expressed in her concluding chapter have been largely borne out in the post-Qaddafi era.