Book Club
University of Winnipeg Library Book Club Lists - motivating reading, thought, and discussion beyond regular academic studies
Summer 2016 Recommended Reads
Here I stand : stories that speak for freedom by
Inspired by the 800-year anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, a selection of writers explore the rights and freedoms still lacking in today's society. Contributors include: Tony Birch, John Boyne, Sita Brahmachari, Russell Brand, Kate Charlesworth, Sarah Crossan, Neil Gaiman, Jack Gantos, Matt Haig, Frances Hardinge, Jackie Kay, AL Kennedy, Liz Kessler, Elizabeth Laird, Sabrina Mahfouz, Paul Muldoon, Chibundu Onuzo, Bali Rai, Chris Riddell, Mary and Brian Talbot, Christie Watson and Tim Wynne-Jones.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9781406358384Publication Date: 2016
Violence All Around by
A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe, before and after the September 11 attacks, to document abuses committed by warlords, terrorist groups, and government counterterrorism forces. Whether reporting on al Qaeda safe houses, the mechanics of the Pentagonâe(tm)s smartest bombs, his interviews with politicians and ordinary civilians, or his own brush with death outside Kabul, John Sifton wants to help us understand violenceâe"what it is, and how we think and speak about it. For the human rights community, the global war on terror brought unprecedented challenges. Of special concern were the secret detention centers operated by the CIA as it expanded into a paramilitary force, and the harsh treatment of prisoners throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. In drafting legal memoranda that made domestic prosecution for these crimes impossible, Sifton argues, the United States possessed not only the detainees but the law itself. Sifton recounts his efforts to locate secret prisons and reflects on the historical development of sanctioned military or police violenceâe"from hand-to-hand combat to the use of dronesâe"and the likelihood that technology will soon enable completely automated killing. Sifton is equally concerned to examine what people have meant by nonviolent social change, and he asks whether pure nonviolence is ever possible. To invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, he reminds us. Ultimately, advocates for human rights can only shame the world into better behavior, and their work may involve advocating the very violence they deplore.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780674057692Publication Date: 2015-05-11
Five Ideas to Fight For by
Human rights, equality, freedom of expression, privacy, the rule of law. These five ideas are vitally important to the way of life we enjoy today. The battle to establish them in law was long and difficult - as recently as 1970 two-hundred-thousand British Asians were almost stripped of their British citizenship as a result of racist legislation. From assaults on the EU Human Rights Act to the revelations about the NSA and GCHQ brought to light by Edward Snowden, our civil liberties are now under threat in ways they never have been before. Leading human rights lawyer Lord Anthony Lester provides an insider account of how political and legal reforms were achieved and demonstrates why we must act now to ensure they survive the next few decades.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9781780747620Publication Date: 2016-04-18
East West Street by
"A ... personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity,' both of whom not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professor, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, 'the little Paris of Ukraine,' a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv ... Sands ... realized that his own field of international law had been forged by two men--Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht--each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather's birth, each of whom had come to be considered the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world"--Dust jacket flap.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780385350716Publication Date: 2016-05-24
Capital by
Celebrated novelist John Lanchester ( an elegant and wonderfully witty writer New York Times) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder are receiving anonymous postcards reading We Want What You Have. Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension."
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780393082074Publication Date: 2012-06-11
The Sympathizer by
The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as five other awards,The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow,The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a "man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780802123459Publication Date: 2015-04-07
Purity by
A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters--Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers--and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780374239213Publication Date: 2015-09-01
On Fantasy Island by
In the 2015 UK General Election, one of the major pledges of the Conservative party was the repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998, to be replaced with a UK Bill of Rights. In this book, Professor Conor Gearty puts forth his case for keeping the Human Rights Act by dissecting the so called 'fantasies' that are driving the case for repeal. Analysing the debate through the perspective of British law, history, politics, and culture, he examines what arguments are in place for the repeal of the Act and how these can be dismissed as no more than 'English exceptionalism'. Structured in three parts, the book first exposes the myths that drive the anti-Human Rights Act argument. Second, in a counter-balance to these arguments, Gearty outlines how the Act operates in practice and what its impact really is 'on the ground'. Third, he looks to the future and the kind of Britain we want to live in, and how, for all its modesty, the survival or otherwise of the Human Rights Act will play a pivotal part in that future.
Call Number: [not in UW catalogue]ISBN: 9780198787631Publication Date: 2016-11-08
