East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity"

Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

A profound and profoundly important book—a moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.

East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, “the little Paris of Ukraine,” a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather, as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities.

East West Street is a book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder.

• The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Gifford Lectures)
• A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis
• Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition
• Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)
• Disgrace: A Novel
• The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Human Rights in History)
• The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning
• Color Conscious
• We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
• What You Did Not Tell: A Father's Past and a Journey Home