Human Rights Politics

Author Byron Williams has written one of the most compelling books of 2023. Through the use of short stories and nonfiction essays, Our American Experiment offers a searing exploration of present-day America, while allowing room for the listener to draw his or her own conclusions.

August 18, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited states and the US government from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex. This book reveals how the 70-year-long fight for women's suffrage was hard-won by leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, and others.

When the final gavel clapped in a rural Southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator.

How to respond effectively to humanitarian crises is one of the most pressing and seemingly intractable problems facing the United Nations. Martin Barber, for many years a senior UN official and with decades of humanitarian experience, here argues that the explanation for UN 'failures' or only partial successes lies not with any lack of idealism or good intentions but with the constraints placed on aid workers by ill-considered policies and poor practical application officials are 'blinded by humanity'.

In What Women Want, Deborah L. Rhode, one of the nation's leading scholars on women and law, brings to the discussion a broad array of interdisciplinary research as well as interviews with heads of leading women's organizations. Is the women's movement stalled? What are the major obstacles it confronts? What are its key priorities and what strategies might advance them? In addressing those questions, the audiobook explores virtually all of the major policy issues confronting women.

Jesper Bengtsson presents a portrait of one of today’s most significant political activists. He chronicles her background as the daughter of Burma’s liberation hero Aung San, the years she spent in England and New York, and her return to Burma in the 1980s. First placed under house arrest by the military junta in 1989, she spent 15 of the subsequent 21 years in captivity, separated from her husband and two children. Throughout that period, she remained a unifying figure and activist for Burma’s democracy movement.

Under the current administration, not only are the civil rights of foreigners in jeopardy, but those of U.S. citizens. A public defender for 29 years, Steven Wax interweaves the stories of two men that he represented: Brandon Mayfield, an American-born lawyer and family man, arrested as a suspected terrorist after a fingerprint was incorrectly traced back to him by the FBI; and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator taken from his apartment to a Pakistani prison and then flown in chains to the United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In the 20th century, free people faced a number of mortal threats, ranging from despotism, fascism, and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. While the struggle against some of these overt dangers continues, some insidious new threats seem to have slipped past our intellectual defenses. These often unchallenged threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms and, in some cases, are widely accepted as beneficial. In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled an all-star lineup of innovative thinkers to challenge these insidious new threats.

In this dramatic first-person narrative, Greg Mortenson picks up where Three Cups of Tea left off in 2003, recounting his relentless, ongoing efforts to establish schools for girls in Afghanistan; his extensive work in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan after a massive earthquake hit the region in 2005; and the unique ways he has built relationships with Islamic clerics, militia commanders, and tribal leaders. He shares for the first time his broader vision to promote peace through education and literacy.

Barely a year after the self-immolation of a young fruit seller in Tunisia, a vast wave of popular protest has convulsed the Middle East, overthrowing long-ruling dictators and transforming the region’s politics almost beyond recognition. But the biggest transformations of what has been labeled as the “Arab Spring” are yet to come. An insider to both American policy and the world of the Arab public, Marc Lynch shows that the fall of particular leaders is but the least of the changes that will emerge from months of unrest.

The 19th daughter of a local village leader in rural Afghanistan, Fawzia Koofi was left to die in the sun after birth by her mother. But she survived, and perseverance in the face of extreme hardship has defined her life ever since. Despite the abuse of her family, the exploitative Russian and Taliban regimes, the murders of her father, brother, and husband, and numerous attempts on her life, she rose to become the first Afghani woman Parliament speaker.

When Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran's presidential election, he assured his pregnant fiancée, Paola, that he'd be back in just a few days, a week at most. Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.

Osorno plasma algo más que la simple resistencia de aquellos que sufren los embates del México Violento y su panda de corruptos: la dimensión heroica de quienes deciden poner un límite y oponerse a la impunidad; la gesta individual, solitaria, de quienes luchan a contracorriente para salvar lo que aún no ha sucumbido al naufragio.

A community of rock quarry miners in a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, gave their tiny cluster of thatched roofed houses the name Azad Nagar. Freedomville. But it hasn't always been identified by that auspicious moniker. The miners renamed their village in 2000, after they staged a revolt that overthrew the profit-driven landowners who held their families in debt bondage for generations. But the complex story of Freedomville, the murder that these revolutionaries nearly got away with, and the short-lived freedom its inhabitants created has never before been told until now.

¿Sabe alguien de la UE lo que está ocurriendo en Libia? Para subirse a una patera rumbo a Europa, decenas de miles de personas han tenido que superar antes una endiablada yincana: atravesar Libia, un país sumido en una guerra no contada entre distintos Gobiernos, milicias tribales, mafias de traficantes y grupos terroristas vinculados al ISIS. El fotógrafo Ricardo García Vilanova y el periodista Karlos Zurutuza han recorrido el país desde 2011 para documentar todas las tramas que conviven en este escenario caótico.

Para subirse a una patera rumbo a Europa, decenas de miles de personas han tenido que superar antes una endiablada yincana: atravesar Libia, un país sumido en una guerra no contada entre distintos Gobiernos, milicias tribales, mafias de traficantes y grupos terroristas vinculados al ISIS. El fotógrafo Ricardo García Vilanova y el periodista Karlos Zurutuza han recorrido el país desde 2011 para documentar todas las tramas que conviven en este escenario caótico y contarlas con los matices y los detalles que no caben en la cobertura de prensa tradicional.

Refugee is an urgent call to action. It is a book to help Christian's untangle themselves from arguments on topics, such as politics and immigration, and truly release the Kingdom of God which is within every believer. Born out of a personal frustration of apathetic Christianity, the book will help guide people into a better understanding of their refugee assignment from heaven for immediate impact.

Multi-Grammy-winning producer and New York Times best-selling author Kabir Sehgal examines the relationship between the US and Mexico, accompanied by music from Grammy-winning musician Arturo O'Farrill and special guests, an extended foreword from historian Douglas Brinkley, and afterword by Ambassador Andrew Young.

Questo libro inizia con un episodio dell'Eneide: il naufragio dei Troiani sulle coste di Cartagine (nei pressi dell'odierna Tunisi, nel canale di Sicilia) mentre sono diretti in Italia. Enea e i suoi vengono accolti dalla regina Didone in nome dell'umanità e del rispetto verso gli dèi, perché le frontiere si chiudono di fronte agli aggressori, non ai naufraghi. Scrive Bettini: "Ci sono troppi dispersi nel mare che fu di Virgilio, troppi cadaveri che fluttuano a mezz'acqua perché quei versi si possano ancora leggere solo come poesia. Sono diventati cronaca".

A unique tour around the world in search of the great thinkers of our time and their next big ideas. With the world at the threshold of profound changes, the questions become: Where are the philosophers? Where are the great thinkers of today? Where is the next Jefferson, Curie, or Mandela? Which technologies and changes in the nature of life will they harness, embrace, or be inspired by?