2012 Year in Review: 12 Great Human Rights Reads

Rights Readers had a terrific reading/discussion year in 2012, I think one of our best.  Here are the books we read and enjoyed together:

In January we read Andrew X. Pham's
The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars, the 'prequel' to the author's wonderful memoir Catfish and Mandala, which we read a few years ago. Eaves tells the story of Pham's father, from the French occupation through WWII and the Vietnam War, in powerful, elegant prose.

We read Susan Choi's novel of paranoia in the age of terrorism, A Person of Interest, in February. I enjoyed her description of academic life in a Midwestern college town, and although her tendency to overwrite slows the book down, I was very invested in the characters by the end and the story had enough 'thriller' in it to propel me forward, eager to get to the satisfying conclusion.


In March, we read A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya. The real pay-off for reading about this brave pioneer for women's rights in Afghanistan was learning that she was the namesake and personal hero for the young Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai who was nearly killed this fall for advocating for education for girls like herself. We look forward to reading Malala's books some day.

We read Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife in April. This impressive debut novel set in the aftermath of the Balkan conflict combines history and folktale in a narrative quest for recovery and healing. I'll be interested to see what this young author does next.

In May, we set sail with National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis' The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World to explore human diversity in remote corners of the globe. Drawing inspiration from such endangered cultures as the seafaring navigators of Polynesia renewed our commitment to language diversity and cultural preservation.

We read Ursula Hegi's novel set on the cusp of World War II, Children and Fire, in June. This was the first time I read Hegi and it won't be the last. Many of the issues the characters in this novel grapple with--propaganda, reproductive health, the roles of teachers and parents as moral guides-- were especially resonant in this election year.


In July we read Avi Steinberg's memoir about working in a prison library, Running the Books.  We loved the author's humorous insights into prison culture and wise reflections on the value of reading and writing. I managed to spread the love for this book to a second book group. Don't be afraid to suggest it to yours!


As usual, in August we took a break from more serious human rights fare and read The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall. If you enjoyed Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe, you should give Indian detective Vish Puri a try.


The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness by Jordan Goodman, our September selection is a hard book to recommend. The subject, British diplomat Roger Casement's efforts to expose abuses in the South American rubber industry, is fascinating (as is Casement's entire life), but the delivery here is just too dull for the casual reader. If you've read Mario Vargas Llhosa's The Dream of the Celt (which I still want to get to), or you're writing a term paper on the history of corporate accountabilty this would be a good book to consult. Otherwise, I'd hold out for a biopic.

I haven't done a formal poll to find out what our favorite book was this year, but I'd put money on Hector Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries winning any popularity contest. And that's not just because the author kindly graced us with his presence at our discussion! This book hit all the marks for us with themes like race, class, immigration, parenting and the politics of urban landscaping in a highly readable package. And yes of course, we love a good L.A. story!

In November, we read Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. This very personal look at the lives of ordinary East Germans shocked us with how little we knew about the aftermath of reunification and the impunity granted to the secret police. Highly recommended.

Finally, this December, we have read Scenes from Village Life by Israeli novelist Amos Oz. This novel-in-stories spins unsettling tales about what's happening below the surface of a small Israeli town-- a great way to move past the familiar headlines from the Middle East and engage in a new way.

Keep an eye on the blog for news of our great 2013 picks. From what I have read of our up-coming books so far, we will have another great year.

Anna Funder on The Lives of Others

I'm sure many of our Loyal Readers thought of the Oscar-winning film The Lives Of Others when we decided to discuss Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall this month. Well, it turns out that the author wrote a column on the movie for The Guardian,

I think the film deserves its public and critical acclaim. It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But its story is a fantasy narrative that could not have taken place (and never did) under the GDR dictatorship. The film has, then, an odd relation to historical truth, a truth that is being bitterly fought for now.

The article has some great background on the making of the film and many other great insights,

To my mind, hoping for salvation to come from the change of heart of a perpetrator is to misunderstand the nature of bureaucratised evil - the way great harms can be inflicted in minute, "legal" steps, or in decisions by committees carried out by people "just doing their jobs".

Do read the whole thing.

Funder, Politkovskaya on The Day of the Imprisoned Writer

Anna Funder on Courage from Australian Broadcasting Corporation on FORA.tv

Today is the Day of the Imprisoned Writer, an annual day intended to recognize and support writers who resist repression of the basic human right to freedom of expression sponsored by PEN International. The timing is perfect for our reading of Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall because it gives me a reason to share the author's thought-provoking PEN lecture made on this day in 2008. Her talk on the subject of courage takes the life and death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy) as her starting point and moves to discuss the courage required for dissent in Germany and the relationship between courage and culture. (There's also some Q&A relating to Stasiland).  

If you haven't got time for the lecture, I recommend this little audio nugget from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, a brief Funder interview where she talks about her motivation to bear witness.

Please visit the PEN International page to learn more about the imprisoned writers like poet and songwriter Ericson Acosta of the Phillipines and journalist and blogger Eskinger Nega of Ethiopia and take action on their behalf.  For an update on the never-ending investigation into Politkovskaya's murder see this recent article in the Washington Post.

Our November Author: Anna Funder

This month we are reading Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall and as usual we have a few links to supplement our discussion. The author has a personal website where you can learn more about the author, Stasiland and her latest book, the novel All That I Am.

There are two very useful interviews available to flesh out issues raised in the book, one from Australian Broadcasting (transcript and audio):

I mean when I went on tour there it was very interesting and very fraught. I did a ten-city tour of East and West Germany for the book, and the book was introduced in the Leipzig Stasi ballroom, this massive, literally secret policemen's ballroom, at the Leipzig Fair nearly two years ago now. And in the front row there were some very fierce-looking, Brylcreemed, bomber jacket-wearing clearly ex Party and Stasi men, sitting in a kind of phalanx with their arms crossed, and when they uncrossed their arms, they started furiously to take notes about what I was saying when I was reading from the book, and then when it was opened for question time after the reading, they sort of scuttled out. And you have to wonder why they're taking notes if not to intimidate me or whether they're keeping more files somehow just out of habit. 

Then after they'd left, (this happened in other cities as well) someone would stand up at the back and say, 'These stories, this happened to me, and no-one talks about it here, and why don't they? And why does it take a foreigner to come and do it?' And all these sorts of questions. Or people would be very angry and stand up and say - one woman who was a journalist in the GDR stood up and said to me, 'Why didn't you write about normal life?' I said, 'I didn't find it normal.

And another from Worlpress.org,

One of the biggest questions the book poses is whether it’s healthier (for a person, a group, a country) to remember a painful past, or to try to forget it and move on. Did you come to any conclusions about that? 

I think the question of how useful it is to rework trauma is a very individual one; it’s a balancing act for each person. There’s one school of thought that says you deal with a past trauma in analysis and then you move on, but that’s a fiction we tell ourselves. You don’t just get something out and move on. In a political sense, not a psychological one, I think it’s incredibly important to compensate people who’ve suffered under a terrible regime—until that’s done, there’s no moving on, and it’s a double repression.

In addition to the video above from Deutsche Welle explaining the process for accessing Stasi files today, check out this new Google multimedia resource which presents the fall of the Iron Curtain with curation assistance from German, Polish and Romanian museums.  Finally, this sophisticated animation, also from DW,  recreates the Berlin Wall and explains it's fortifications.

Intro to Stasiland

This month we are reading Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder. The book explores the psychological legacy of the communist-era East German state security apparatus. The Australian video above is a great way to get started with the topic, introducing you to a couple of unrepentant Stasi officers, visiting Stasi headquarters and taking you on a tour of the Stasi prison, Hohenschönhausen, led by a former inmate. Anna Funder provides insight along the way. To hear another inmate tell his story, including how Shakespeare helped him through his ordeal, see this PBS Newshour slide show. More discussion (and photos) of the work of the prison museum is available from Wired. Stay tuned for more on the book in the next few days.

For November- Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

We have selected Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall for November,

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterward the two Germanys reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder’s bestselling Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who tried to escape to West Berlin as a sixteen-year-old; hears the heartbreaking story of Frau Paul, who was separated from her baby by the Berlin Wall; and gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger of the East,” once declared by the authorities—to his face—“no longer to exist.” And she meets the Stasi men themselves, still proud of their surveillance methods. Funder’s powerful account of that brutal world has become a contemporary classic.