The best readable books on human rights

I studied under the distinguished sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein. One day in class he said, if you read only one book, it should be this one. So I read it. 

Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who joined the German Communist Party. He became disillusioned with communism, in part because of the Stalin trials of the 1930s, in which many of Stalin’s own former allies were tortured and executed. 

The protagonist of the novel is Rubashov, a dedicated Communist who is accused of treason, tortured, and eventually executed despite confessing to his supposed crimes. The novel is a great way to learn not only about the Stalinist Soviet Union, but about any society that brain-washes its victims. 

Fatima Mernissi was a Moroccan feminist. This book is her memoir of growing up in a harem (an enclosed all-female space) in Morocco in the 1940s and 50s.

It dispels many of the stereotypes and prejudices that many Westerners hold about how Islamic society treats women. The harem Mernissi grew up in was a warm and loving space. One of the elderly women living in it had been a slave, but was now cared for by the family. It was also a space where women could talk about their condition and consider ways of rebelling against it.

I assigned this book to a class on women’s human rights in the 1990s. It was very popular among the students, including the one man, whose background on his father’s side was Palestinian.

This was the first book I read on North Korea.

North Korea is a combination of the Soviet Gulag and Auschwitz. Under the reign of the three Kims (grandfather, father, and son), North Koreans have endured malnourishment and starvation since the 1990s. Most of this would been avoidable if the government hadn’t had ridiculous economic policies forbidding private enterprise, and also imprisoned anyone who criticized the Kims’ rule. 

Remick is a journalist who introduces North Korea to a general audience by interviewing six refugees.  I “assigned” this book to one of my ladies’ book clubs and they found it very interesting and easy to read.

This 1975 feminist discussion really opened my eyes when I was a young scholar to how pervasive rape is all over the world. 

Brownmiller discusses rape during war, during pogroms, and during persecutions of various kinds. She focuses on sexual violence against Blacks during slavery, and against American “Indians,” as they were then called.

She also discusses prison rape and sexual violence against children. She investigates the literature on the psychology both of rapists, and of victims of rape. Although much has changed since 1975, this is a classic that anyone interested in the history of feminism, or the history of rape, should read.  

This is one of the first books in English on what we now call the Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s.

It’s now estimated that about 3.3 million people died in this famine, which Stalin imposed via a policy of “collectivization.” Under this policy, Ukrainian peasants had to turn over their entire harvests to the state, leaving nothing for themselves to eat: some even turned to cannibalism. Things were so bad that the government put up posters saying, “eating people is wrong.” 

When Conquest published this book in 1986, many people denounced him as a right-wing anti-communist, but since then many other scholars have proved him right. This was one of the first books I read when I started teaching courses on comparative genocide studies in the 1980s.