While I am the most talented and attractive of the Brothers Dawes, my brother James is the most "successful" and "accomplished" and "loved by our parents." He is an English Professor. He went to Penn, Cambridge, and Harvard. He "cares" about "people". He has never been accused of receiving oral sex from a drunken fan in the back hallways of a comedy club. And now he is an author of two books, the most recent of which covers THE greatest humanitarian crises of our generation and the modern human rights movement charged with stopping them.
The book is called That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity
Here is the short blurb from the Harvard University Press page about the book:
After the worst thing in the world happens, then what? What is left to the survivors, the witnesses, those who tried to help? What can we do to prevent more atrocities from happening in the future, and to stop the ones that are happening right now? That the World May Know tells the powerful and moving story of the successes and failures of the modern human rights movement. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the human cost of confronting inhumanity in our day.There is no dearth of such stories to tell, and James Dawes begins with those that emerged from the Rwandan genocide. Who, he asks, has the right to speak for the survivors and the dead, and how far does that right go? How are these stories used, and what does this tell us about our collective moral future? His inquiry takes us to a range of crises met by a broad array of human rights and humanitarian organizations. Here we see from inside the terrible stresses of human rights work, along with its curious seductions, and the myriad paradoxes and quandaries it presents.
With pathos, compassion, and a rare literary grace, this book interweaves personal stories, intellectual and political questions, art and aesthetics, and actual "news" to give us a compelling picture of humanity at its conflicted best, face-to-face with humanity at its worst.
BUY MY BROTHER'S BOOK: That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity
Posted by Bill Dawes at 1:54 PM