East West Street
On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A profound, important book, a moving personal detective story and an uncovering of secret pasts, set in Europe’s center, the city of bright colors—Lviv, Ukraine, dividing east from west, north from south, in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.
It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement ... told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author).
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 professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv.
Phillipe Sands changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sands (Torture Team), a human rights lawyer and professor of international law at University College London, takes readers on a labyrinthine journey into the personal histories of three men whose lives were forever altered by the Nuremberg trials of October 1946. Two of them Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht were founding luminaries of the new field of international human rights law; the third, Hans Frank, was Hitler's personal legal counsel. Sands intertwines their stories with his own tragic family history, and seeks to illuminate the guiding principles of humanitarian law while unearthing the forgotten stories of the men who fought for its establishment in the wake of Nazi devastation. Part detective story and part heart-wrenching family history, the teeming narrative is anchored in the Ukrainian city of L'viv (alternately Lw w, L'vov, or Lemberg), hometown of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, and an emblem of the changing face of 20th-century Europe. Yet despite this attention to place, the book feels curiously unmoored, with the personalities and ambitions of its three main characters getting lost under a glut of biographical detail. Sands clearly revels in discovering long-lost family secrets; unfortunately, he also loses sight of the innovations in legal theory that Lemkin and Lauterpacht helped usher in, the ostensible focus on which is arguably the book's most original aspect.
