Europe

Thousands of naturalized French men and women had their citizenship revoked by the Vichy government during the Second World War. Once denaturalized, these men and women, mostly Jews who were later sent to concentration camps, ceased being French on official records and walked off the pages of history. As a result, we have for decades severely underestimated the number of French Jews murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc unearths this tragic record and rewrites World War II history.

On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman's own history, memory, and knowledge.

October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners forced to assist the Nazis. While working, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

Baron Otto von Wächter, Austrian lawyer, husband, father, high Nazi official, senior SS officer, former governor of Galicia during the war, creator and overseer of the Krakow ghetto, indicted after as a war criminal for the mass murder of more than 100,000 Poles, hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the British, by Simon Wiesenthal, on the run for three years, from 1945 to 1948 . . .

Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.

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.

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors.

Social movements such as environmentalism, feminism, nationalism, and the anti-immigration movement are a prominent feature of the modern world and have attracted increasing attention from scholars in many countries. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, first published in 1996, brings together a set of essays that focus upon mobilization structures and strategies, political opportunities, and cultural framing and ideologies. The essays are comparative and include studies of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.

This book traces the cultural construction of violence, body, and history in urban Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1986. The oral histories and commentary encompass events beginning with the intercommunal rioting of 1969 and terminating with the 1981 Hunger Strike in the Maze prison. It is a genetic history, a genealogical analysis of the symbolic forms, material practices, and narrative strategies through which certain types of political agency are constructed in Northern Ireland.

Does oil wealth lead to political poverty? It often looks that way, but Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story. In this magisterial study, Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of energy, bringing into his grasp as he does so environmental politics, the struggle for democracy, and the place of the Middle East in the modern world.