#onthesamepage book recommendation by Laksmi Pamuntiak

70 years ago, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At this year’s Frankfurter Buchmesse (10–14 October 2018) we are using the occasion of this anniversary to raise awareness of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the values it upholds. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association and Frankfurter Buchmesse have joined together with ARTE, ZDF and DER SPIEGEL with support of the United Nations (UN) and Amnesty International to create the a campaign WE ARE ON THE SAME PAGE. We are celebrating this anniversary and joining forces to demonstrate how important it is nowadays to defend these universal rights. More info >>

Wachsmann, Nikolaus: KL

The definitive history of the Nazi concentration camps, whose highest achievement is its seamless welding of prodigious scholarship and a novelist’s attention to detail, human texture, character, and unvarnished humanity.

The Right to Have Rights

A slim book of essays recently published by Verso by four academics each trying, focusing on one word, to unpack the famous Hannah Arendt phrase, “The right to have rights.” It also looks at Arendt’s initial skepticism of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as she later enshrined in her 1951 masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Uki Goni: The Real Odessa and Atwood, Margret: A Handmaid’s Tale

The former is a chilling study on the extent to which Argentina’s mass killing program — resulting in some 30,000 of its ‘disappeared’ — might have been influenced by the country’s harboring of numerous Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Mengele after the war. It also looks at the premise of the latter, a novel of great power: the heinous practice, inspired by the Lebensborn program, of keeping women alive as human incubators, murdering them after they gave birth and handing their babies to raise as their own. It also speaks to our times: that a society that separates children from their parents is a society that is already on the path of totalitarianism.

Gordimer, Nadine: July’s People

The story a white family forced out of their home by black rioters, who are taken in by their servant July and must now live as he lives, trusting him with their lives. Spare, unsentimental, written almost with cold candor, it looks at the nature of power reversal, the incompatibility between fear and true intimacy, and sex as a liberating form of self-exile.

#onthesamepage book recommendation by Srecko Horvat

#onthesamepage book recommendation by Namita Gokhale

#onthesamepage book recommendation by Ismail Serageldin

#onthesamepage book recommendation by Dr. Ruth Westheimer

#onthesamepage book recommendation by Arnon Grunberg