Here are 83 books that The Rabbit House fans have personally recommended if you like
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My name is Rebecca Sanford, and my debut novel is based on the historical events of Argentina's last military dictatorship and the work of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As a graduate student in the international affairs program at The New School, I conducted field research for my master's thesis with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers at the University of Buenos Aires. This experience inspired a fictional story that ultimately became The Disappeared.
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.
Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant women tortured, 30,000 individuals "disappeared"--these were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Finalist for the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award in 1998, A Lexicon of Terror is a sensitive and unflinching account of the sadism, paranoia, and deception the military junta unleashed on the Argentine people from 1976 to 1983.
This updated edition features a new epilogue that chronicles major political, legal, and social developments in Argentina since the book's initial publication. It also continues the stories of the individuals involved in the…
My name is Rebecca Sanford, and my debut novel is based on the historical events of Argentina's last military dictatorship and the work of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As a graduate student in the international affairs program at The New School, I conducted field research for my master's thesis with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers at the University of Buenos Aires. This experience inspired a fictional story that ultimately became The Disappeared.
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, thisis 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.
My name is Rebecca Sanford, and my debut novel is based on the historical events of Argentina's last military dictatorship and the work of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As a graduate student in the international affairs program at The New School, I conducted field research for my master's thesis with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers at the University of Buenos Aires. This experience inspired a fictional story that ultimately became The Disappeared.
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.
Following is an extract from the book: "I want to touch you and kiss you." You are my mother's sister and only one year older; you must have something of my mother in you". - A found child after being returned to her family. "Searching for Life" traces the courageous plight of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who challenged the ruthless dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Acting as both detectives and human rights advocates in an effort to find and recover their grandchildren, the Grandmothers identified fifty-seven of an estimated 500…
My name is Rebecca Sanford, and my debut novel is based on the historical events of Argentina's last military dictatorship and the work of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As a graduate student in the international affairs program at The New School, I conducted field research for my master's thesis with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers at the University of Buenos Aires. This experience inspired a fictional story that ultimately became The Disappeared.
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.
In Disappearing Acts, Diana Taylor looks at how national identity is shaped, gendered, and contested through spectacle and spectatorship. The specific identity in question is that of Argentina, and Taylor's focus is directed toward the years 1976 to 1983 in which the Argentine armed forces were pitted against the Argentine people in that nation's "Dirty War." Combining feminism, cultural studies, and performance theory, Taylor analyzes the political spectacles that comprised the war-concentration camps, torture, "disappearances"-as well as the rise of theatrical productions, demonstrations, and other performative practices that attempted to resist and subvert the Argentine military. Taylor uses performance theory…
I worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice in 2009 when Uruguay held a second referendum to overturn the country’s amnesty law that protected the police and military from prosecution for human rights abuses during the country’s dictatorship. Despite the country’s stable democracy and progressive politics in the 21st century, citizens quite surprisingly rejected the opportunity to overturn the state-sanctioned impunity law. My interest in broader accountability efforts in the world and that seemingly shocking vote in Uruguay drove me to want to study the roots of that failed effort, ultimately compelling a broader investigation into how human rights culture in Uruguay evolved, particularly during and after its period of military rule.
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.
At a time when a global consensus on human rights standards seems to be emerging, this rich study steps back to explore how the idea of human rights is actually employed by activists and human rights professionals. Winifred Tate, an anthropologist and activist with extensive experience in Colombia, finds that radically different ideas about human rights have shaped three groups of human rights professionals working there - nongovernmental activists, state representatives, and military officers. Drawing from the life stories of high-profile activists, pioneering interviews with military officials, and research at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, "Counting the…
Jasper Becker is a foreign correspondent who spent decades reporting on China and the Far East. His the author of numerous books including Hungry Ghosts – Mao’s Secret Famine, Rogue Regime – Kim Jong Il and the looming threat of North Korea, City of Heavenly Tranquillity, and most recently Made in China – Wuhan, COVID and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy.
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.
Already famous throughout Europe, this international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres. Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of Communism over seventy years.
"Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit," Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience-in the China of "the Great Helmsman," Kim Il Sung's Korea, Vietnam under "Uncle Ho" and Cuba under…
I am fortunate not to have witnessed any major riots myself; the worst I’ve endured was a 1993 street fight in Moscow between parading Communists and the police, with bricks on one side and clubs and water cannon on the other. But even a relatively gentle protest march that draws a police response can be an astonishing spectacle, transforming a familiar, modern city into a medieval battlefield of massed crowds confronting armored men on horseback. And I am fascinated by the place of crowd actions in democratic societies. The right to assemble is embedded in our constitution, but there’s a fine line between public expression and mob rule.
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.
How right-wing political entrepreneurs around the world use religious offense—both given and taken—to mobilize supporters and marginalize opponents.
In the United States, elements of the religious right fuel fears of an existential Islamic threat, spreading anti-Muslim rhetoric into mainstream politics. In Indonesia, Muslim absolutists urge suppression of churches and minority sects, fostering a climate of rising intolerance. In India, Narendra Modi's radical supporters instigate communal riots and academic censorship in pursuit of their Hindu nationalist vision. Outbreaks of religious intolerance are usually assumed to be visceral and spontaneous. But in Hate Spin, Cherian George shows that they often involve sophisticated…
I have always strived to speak out when surrounded by silence, whether in person through my own voice, or through the books I have written and had published. Not because I am heroic or noble, but because I am angered by suppressed truth, and I believe reality should be shown as it is, not as people believe it should be. That is why the books I chose are so important to me, because they fearlessly exposed the truths the respective authors were determined to show, risks be damned. I hope these books inspire you as much as they have inspired me.
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.
The thrilling Cold War masterwork by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, published in full for the first time.
"Solzhenitsyn's best novel. . . . A great and important book, whose qualities are finally fully available to English-speaking readers.” —Washington Post
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949.The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are…
Working as a social anthropologist in Uganda, Ghana, Malaysia, and Catalonia, I became fascinated by villages as microcosms of broader social change, places where history can be observed in the making through the lives and histories of families and of their members. Villages are anything but ‘natural’ communities or social backwaters. They survive (or perish) because people, beliefs, and goods are continually moving in and out. Village lives are certainly shaped by state and society, but the impact goes both ways. Each of my selected books tells a gripping and distinctive story of villagers grappling with social and cultural tension, the forces of change, and the challenges of survival.
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…
This study focuses on the politics of memory in the village of Dachuan in northwest China, in which 85 percent of the villagers are surnamed Kong and believe themselves to be descendants of Confucius. It recounts both how this proud community was subjected to intense suffering during the Maoist era, culminating in its forcible resettlement in December 1960 to make way for the construction of a major hydroelectric dam, and how the village eventually sought recovery through the commemoration of that suffering and the revival of a redefined religion.
Before 1949, the Kongs had dominated their area because of their…
I first visited and worked in Libya in 1977. At the time, only a handful of books on Libya were available in English, and all of them were technical studies related to the petroleum industry. In an effort to better understand the political economy of this beautiful and intriguing state, I began to conduct my own field research. This research led to the publication in 1981 of two articles on Libya under the pseudonym of our two sons because it was dangerous for anyone to publish critical analysis of the Qaddafi regime. I remain fascinated with Libya, and over time, I have published five books and well over 100 articles and reviews on Libya.
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.
The entire story of Qaddafi's corrupt and repressive regime, the details of its downfall, and what Libya's future may hold in store
For a reader unfamiliar with the history of Libya, Muammar Qaddafi might be mistaken for a character in fiction. His eccentric leadership as the nation's "Brother Leader," his repressive regime, sponsorship of terrorist violence, unique vision of the state, and relentless hold on power all seem implausibly extreme. This riveting book documents the extraordinary reality of Qaddafi's rise and 42-year reign. It also explores the tenacious popular uprising that finally defeated him and the possibilities for Libya as…