A Life On The Left: Moritz Mebel’s Journey Through The Twentieth Century

In A Life on the Left, Moritz Mebel describes life as a Jewish refugee from Germany in 1930s Moscow, service in the Red Army during the war, and what it meant to be a Jew in Stalin’s Russia and communist East Germany. He also evaluates his life as a political activist upon his return to East Germany after Stalin’s death and offers insight into the allure of communism

The Tables Of The Law

His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and holiness---the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure. --|Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law, the Nobel Prize winner\u27s retelling of the prophet\u27s life. Invited in 1943 to write this story as a defense of the Decalogue, Mann reveals how strange and forbidding Moses\u27 task was. As the Lawgiver ---endowed with the wrists and hands of a stonemason---engraves the tablets, so he hews the souls of his people: Into the stone of the mountain I carved the ABC of human behavior, but it shall also be carved into your flesh and blood, Israel... --|Mann\u27s tale of the ethical founding and molding of a people sharply rebukes the Nazis for their intended destruction of the moral code set down in the Ten Commandments. But does his famous irony and authorial license mock or enhance the Biblical account of the shaping of the Jewish people? You know the Bible story. Now read Mann\u27s version---it will grip you anew. --Book Jacke

Mass Rape: The War Against Women In Bosnia-Herzegovina

Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of that ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. The women - primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin - have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming. The first English edition contains Stiglmayer\u27s updates to her own two essays, one detailing the historical context of the current conflict and the other presenting the core of the book - interviews with some twenty victims of rape as well as interviews with three Serbian perpetrators. Essays investigating mass rape and war from ethnopsychological, sociological, cultural, and medical perspectives are included. New essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rhonda Copelon, and Susan Brownmiller address the crucial issues of recognizing the human rights of women and children. A foreword by Roy Gutman describes war crimes within the context of the UN Tribunal, and an afterword by Cynthia Enloe relates the mass rapes of this war to developments and reactions in the international women\u27s movement. Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement, and systematic attempts to impregnate - all in the name of ethnic cleansing - make for the grimmest of reading. However brutal and appalling the information conveyed here, this book cannot and should not be ignored. --BOOK JACKE