Philippe Sands

“There were several other things written about the ‘torture memos’ as they were called during the Bush administration. But Sands went ahead and interviewed the authors of those memos and tried to get to the bottom of their motivation…The motivations are similar to the ones that the United States has criticised in many other countries that are accused of torture. They use the idea of there being exceptions to the rule and that this was needed because the US was in a state of emergency, and maybe these arguments are a little more sophisticated than what Pinochet and his minions came up with 30 years ago, but they are not all that different…The other aspect of it is also that these proponents of torture during the Bush administration say that it works, and I think that Philippe Sands’s book demonstrates that this is by no means the case.” Read more...

The best books on Torture

Juan Mendez, Lawyer

“This is a fantastic and very impressive book. He manages to maintain lots of different storylines through quite complex material, in a way that I found completely absorbing. He’s tracing the history of the notion of war crimes and genocide, through two lawyers who were most associated with the Nuremberg trials. They were not related to each other, and didn’t even knew each other very well, but they both came from the same town in Poland that his grandfather also came from…It’s also telling a story of the Holocaust, and how his grandparents managed to escape Vienna quite late and get back to London. There are lots of unanswered questions and loose ends in the story that he gets told by his mother and his grandfather never talked about it. He follows up all of these loose ends, including trying to find the mysterious woman who saved his mother’s life by taking her, as a baby, across Europe, for what turns out to be bizarre motives.” Read more...

Best Nonfiction Books of 2016

Stephanie Flanders, Economist