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Obedience and Individual Responsibility Related

Obedience to Authority - Stanley Milgram

The results and analysis of Milgram's psychology experiment at Yale on obedience

Crimes of Obedience - Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton

"The My Lai massacre, Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair: these are examples of the tendency for people to commit illegal acts when so ordered by authority. This book examines these events and the public's response to them, presenting a major analysis of the rationale behind 'crimes of obedience'." (Book cover)

Ordinary Men - Christopher R. Browning

"Widely reviewed and read in hardcover, this is the shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews. "Browning tells us about such Germans and helps us understand . . . how they were transformed psychologically. . . into active participants in the most monstrous crime in human history."--New York Times Book Review, front page."

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt

"In disturbing defense of one of Hitler's top associates, Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, who covered his trial for the New Yorker, contends he was an innocuous, misunderstood pawn. Despite indisputable evidence that Eichmann masterminded the horrible effectiveness of the extermination camps, Arendt claimed he "never actually attended a mass execution by shooting" or a "gassing process"--as if that would absolve him. Eichmann's plea (with which Arendt empathizes) was that "there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience." Still, from a man who publicly expressed pleasure "that I killed five million Jews," it's clear he had no conscience at all."

The Altruistic Personality - Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner

"Why, during the Holocaust, did some ordinary people risk their lives and the lives of their families to help others--even total strangers--while others stood passively by? Samuel Oliner, a Holocaust survivor who has interviewed more than 700 European rescuers and nonrescuers, provides some surprising answers in this compelling work."

Autobiographies

Alicia: My Story - Alicia Appleman-Jurman

"After losing her entire family to the Nazis at age 13, Alicia Appleman-Jurman went on to save the lives of thousands of Jews, offering them her own courage and hope in a time of upheaval and tragedy."

Warriors Don't Cry - Melba Pattillo Beals

"Melba Patillo Beals was one of nine black teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas's Central High School in 1957. For Melba and her friends it marked their transformation into reluctant warriors--on a battlefield that helped shape the civil rights movement. Warriors Don't Cry is their riveting story. "

Alone - Admiral Byrd

"This journal account of Byrd's months at the South Pole reveal the most extreme circumstances that force a man to discover the absolute limits of his will and inner strength. With the heritage of the great sea explorers, and precursor to the great space adventurers, Byrd forces himself to unveil the depths of fear and determination when he alone is responsible for his survival. This book is one of the great adventure stories of the twentieth century and its factual account rivals any piece of fiction. "

Black Ice - Lorene Cary

"In 1972 Lorene Cary, a bright, ambitious teenager from Philadelphia, went as a scholarship student to a formerly all-white, all-male (and still unapologetically elite) school in New Hampshire. She was determined to suceed--without selling out. This wonderfully frank and perceptive memoir describes the perils and ambiguities of that double role. "

Wild Swans - Jung Chang

"In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century."

Life and Death in Shanghai - Nien Cheng

"Here is the haunting, inspirational account of Nien Cheng's six-and-a-half years as a political prisoner during Communist China's Cultural Revolution. "

Please Don't Shoot My Dog - Jackie Cooper

Summary currently unavailable

Auschwitz and After - Charlotte Delbo

Arrested in Paris for planning to spread anti-German propaganda, Delbo begins her journey to the Nazi camps

An American Childhood - Annie Dillard

"Appearing on bestseller lists everywhere (including five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list), the hardcover edition of this title instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country with its joyous, exhilarating memories of growing up in the 1950s. "

Tales from a Child of the Enemy - Ursula Duba

"A German woman recalls her childhood in the rubble of Hitler's Germany--and the shattering revelation, years later, of the Holocaust in this haunting sequence of prose poems. Interwoven with these are the wrenching stories of the Holocaust survivors and their children who were her neighbors in an Eastern neighborhood in Brooklyn in the mid-sixties. Duba's confrontation with his heritage is unflinching and the stories hard to forget"

Singing to Cuba - Margarita Engle

"In the novel Singing to Cuba, a Cuban American farm wife returns to Cuba after a 30-year absence in search of family and self identity, and discovers the horrible reality of her family's suffering. Margarita Engle chronicles the brutal relocation of innocent peasants to prison-cities known throughout Cuba as "Captive Towns", where descendants of those imprisoned during the early 1960s remain incarcerated today. Scenes of the narrator's travels in Cuba as she visits relatives, both dissident and Communist, are juxtaposed with an account of the imprisonment of the narrator's great uncle Gabriel, once a Castro supporter. This is perhaps the finest political novel to come from the American Cuban community to date. "

Zlata's Diary - Zlata Filipovic

"In September 1991, shortly before war broke out on the streets of Sarajevo, 11-year-old Zlata Filipovic began to keep a diary. In a voice both innocent and wise, she wrote of the horrors of war--the deaths of friends, a shortage of food, and days spent in fear--and issued a compelling plea for peace that has moved parents and children, and will continue to awaken the conscience of the world."

The Flame Trees of Thika - Elspeth Huxley

"Through Elspeth Huxley's marvelous gift for description, early twentieth-century Kenya comes alive with all the excitement and naive insight of a child who watches with eyes wide open as coffee trees are planted, buffaloes are skinned, pythons are disemboweled, and cultures collide with all the grace of runaway trains. With a free-wheeling imagination and a dry wit, she describes the interactions of Kikuyus, Masais, Dutch Boers, Brits and Scots, mixing rapid-fire descriptions with philosophical musings. It is a mixture that suits her land of contrasts and unknowns, where vastly different peoples live and work side by side but rarely come together."

The Liars' Club - Mary Karr

"In this powerfully funny, razor's edge tale of a fractured girlhood, prize-winning poet and critic Mary Karr conjures up the terrors and joys of growing up in a swampy East Texas refinery town, at the epicenter of a family full of passionate, volatie attachments. In a voice stipped of self-pity, in language reinvented with a raw authenticity and brilliant energy, Karr shows readers a "terrific family of liars and drunks . . . redeemed by a slow unearthing of truth.""

Me Me Me Me Me: Not a Novel - M. E. Kerr

"Card catalog description : The author recounts escapades from her own teenage years and reveals how many of those real-life people and events served as springboards for the fictional characters and plots in her nine young adult novels."

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

"A formless book, it describes a series of frenetic trips back and forth across the United States by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed, and mysticism. The book was one of the first novels associated with the Beat movement of the 1950s. "

Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston

"From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister : Maxine Hong Kingston grew up in two worlds. There was "solid America," the place her parents emigrated to, and the China of her mother's "talk-stories." In talk-stories women were warriors and her mother was still a doctor in China who could cure the sick and scare away ghosts, not a harried and frustrated woman running a stifling laundromat in California. But what is story and what is truth? In China, a ghost is a supernatural being; in America it is anyone who is not Chinese. In addition, underlying even the most exciting talk-stories of Chinese women warriors is the real oppression of Chinese women: "There is a Chinese word for the female 'I' - which is 'slave.' " In an attempt to figure out her world, Maxine Hong Kingston finds herself creating stories of her own, filling in the blanks her mother has not told her because her daughter is, after all, not true Chinese and thus cannot be completely trusted. Can these new stories explain why she had trouble speaking in the American schools? Can they help her understand the aunt who committed adultery and whose existence is denied? The new stories refuse to fall into traditional forms, and the realizations that come from them often bring out a beautiful, passionate anger that practically burns through the pages. This is powerful, experimental writing, a combination of love, hate, frustration, and sheer beauty."

All But My Life - Gerda Weissmann Klein

"Klein's openness and warmth are reflected everywhere in her famous book, from the opening account of her family in prewar Poland to her three-year imprisonment in German work camps. On May 7, 1945, she was liberated by the U.S. Army and rescued by Lt. Kurt Klein, whom she married. "

Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid - Evelyn Lau

Diary of a teenage Chinese-Canadian girl, struggling through daily life and looking for love in all the wrong places

Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom - Isabella Leitner

"Isabella's heart-wrenching and powerful memoirs of Auschwitz and her family's miraculous escape are combined in a single chronological narrative--a luminous testament to their indomitable love and will to survive."

Survival in Auschwitz - Primo Levi

Customer's comments: "Primo Levi deposits us in a world where the typical convivality that makes human society bearable has been eliminated and replaced by a horrible premise: humans may only live if they can do work useful to the state. "Survival in Auschwitz" plays the theme out. Those who are unable to work are immediately killed, using the most efficient means possible. Those who survive must find ways to maintain the illusion of usefulness with the least possible exertion. Instead of brotherhood, there is commerce, a black market where a stolen bar of soap is traded for a loaf of bread; the soap allows the owner to maintain a more healthy appearance while the bread feeds its owner for another day."

Parrot in the Oven - Victor Martinez

"For Manuel Hernandez, the year leading up to his test of courage, his initiation into a gang, is a time filled with the pain and tension, awkwardness and excitement of growing up in a mixed-up, crazy world. Manny wants to find out what it means to be a vato firme, a guy to respect, in this powerful novel of a young Mexican-American boy's coming-of-age experiences. "

Kaffir Boy - Mark Mathabane

Customer's comments: "Being from South Africa myself originally - now London - I found this to be the most phenomenal account of what life was really like during the most difficult years. A most compelling read. An essential addition to all bookcases. THIS IS HOW IT WAS. "

Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt

"Born in depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants, Frank McCourt experienced a childhood fraught with poverty and occasional cruelty. When the family moves back to Limerick, Frank endures the most miserable of childhoods. An astonishing, glorious debut, Angela's Ashes recounts McCourt's existence with remarkable exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. "

The Hunger of Memory - Richard Rodriguez

"Hunger Of Memory is the story of a Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum."

Two Badges of Mona Ruiz - Mona Ruiz

"Never forgetting the words of her father, who said that police are Christ's soldiers on the rough city streets, Mona Ruiz spent her youth with gangs, married an abusive husband, then went from collecting welfare to preserving the welfare of others as a police officer in her hometown of Santa Ana. Ruiz tells her story with the objective eye of a detective who sees both the issues of necessity in joining a gang and the gang system's fatal vision of drugs and war. Informative and inspiring, Ruiz is one who made it out of the gangs, but never abandoned the streets. "

When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago

"Selling over 16,000 copies in hardcover, this triumphant coming-of-age memoir is now available in paperback editions in both English and Spanish. In the tradition of Black Ice, Santiago writes lyrically of her childhood on her native island and of her bewildering years of transition in New York City. "

A Summer Life - Gary Soto

"From the Publisher : Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his reader to a ground-level perspective, resreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold," the taps of his shoes and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles," his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of basesall." The child's world is made up of small things--small, very important things. "

Rain of Gold - Victor Villaseņor

Reader's comments: "The missing link for me as a Mexican American. I was deeply moved and enlightened as a began to wake up to the deep and rich history our Mexican families have but have been afraid to pass on for fear it meant not assimilating. I fell in love with my first Mexican storyteller. The passion in which Villasenor tells his story is enrapturing. I read Michners Mexico and saw the beauty of Mexico, Villasenor helped me feel the heart of the people & re-learn the powerful lesson of enduriing love."

One Writer's Beginnings - Eudora Welty

"Among the most beloved of American writers, Eudora Welty's stories and novels have entertained us for over half a century. Here, in her memoirs, she writes with her usual candor and grace about how a writer's sensibilities are shaped. As compelling as her stories, as witty as her personality, as finely honed as her fiction, Welty's account of her life is a powerful and fulfilling read. "

Night - Elie Wiesel

"A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again."

Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood - Binjamin Wilkomirski

"Binjamin Wilkomirski was a child when the round-up of the Jews in Poland began. His father was killed in front of him, he was separated from his family, and found himself in Majdanek death camp, surrounded by strangers. In piercingly simple scenes, Wilkomirski gives readers the "fragments" of his recollections from this arduous time in his life. "

Black Boy - Richard Wright

"Black Boy describes vividly Wright's often harsh, hardscrabble boyhood and youth in rural Mississippi and in Memphis, Tenn. When the work was first published, many white critics viewed Black Boy primarily as an attack on racist Southern white society. From the 1960s the work came to be understood as the story of Wright's coming of age and development as a writer whose race, though a primary component of his life, was but one of many that formed him as an artist."

Malcolm X - Malcolm X

"Biography, published in 1965, of the American black militant religious leader and activist who was born Malcolm Little. Written by Alex Haley, who had conducted extensive audiotaped interviews with Malcolm X just before his assassination in 1965, the book gained renown as a classic work on black American experience. The Autobiography recounts the life of Malcolm X from his traumatic childhood plagued by racism to his years as a drug dealer and pimp, his conversion to the Black Muslim sect (Nation of Islam) while in prison for burglary, his subsequent years of militant activism, and the turn late in his life to more orthodox Islam."

Synopses courtesy of Amazon.com Largest On-line Bookstore

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