Customer Reviews

Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide

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It's a good book as a starting point and I'd have no problem recommending this to child as young as 11 or 12 or to parents of those even younger. Historically the reach is quite broad. Her focus is on bullying activity as a necessary precursor to especially as much of the books shows how childhood and teen relationships reflect what is going on in the corresponding adult society. It strikes a balance. It does not drill one in graphic horror nor detailed political discussion. Yet it does not shy away from issues such as rape, child soldiers and living with the aftermath. The language is clear and the material gives a well organized overview of what is indeed a difficult subject.

Her thesis is that all genocides are similar in that they are the last worst outcome of a process of delegitimization starting not with violence but through words. We see evidence of this in the relationships between children. "If you have 10 cockroaches (cockroach being a well known derogatory term given by Tutsis by Hutus) in your town and you kill four of them, how many do you have left to kill?" was a math problem given to Rwandan school children in the 1960s. Where mass murder becomes imagined as desired it in turn becomes possible. "If 3 Jews robbed a bank and each got a part of the loot proportionate to their ages...." was a math problem given to German students in 1933. The mathematics of dehumanization becomes the calculus of destruction.

It is Coloroso's understanding of bullying that forms the central core of her book. Genocide is not just the purvey of politicians and armies. Coloroso shows that co-option of the general population is required as well. A bully while being an instigator requires not only henchmen but a hierarchy of active and passive supporters. Additionally they require an active regime to demonizes the target thus loosing moral inhibitions to attack, dissuade witnesses from seeing or believing the obvious and discourage others from acting in their defense.

Coloroso is a former nun and a forceful speaker on parenting and children's issues. I've heard her speak about bullying programs at my children's school. My own copy of this book was obtained at the book launch in 2007. Members of the Armenian community were there too, and I made a commitment at the time to find out more about what happened to them at that time.. (You will see some of that in my upcoming reviews.).

Well worth reading.

Wow. I read this book under it's Canadian release name, "Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide", which appears more fitting to the subject material. Under either name, this book takes the difficult issue of genocide and parallels it with the serious problem of bullying. Through its use of the "bully circle", it demonstrates the way governments and news media outside the conflict, as well as individuals within the conflict, can make choices to protect the defenseless or perpetuate the abuse. From my perspective as a reformed bully, this book shows the impact these choices make on millions of lives in both arenas. I would recommend this as a great text for high school sociology courses and a must-read for high school counselors, but it also serves as an excellent primer for foreign policy where claims of "conflict" serve as a smokescreen for "extraordinary evil".

This book should be a must read. The ideas presented in this book relate directly to the happenings in our world today in the school yard and on the world scene. Those who ignore history are destined to repeat it and I hope the concepts in the this small book can help us to be more aware and less apt to repeat some of the horrors of our world.

Check the author's biography. She doesn't have a degree in anything, let alone history.

Genocide became a household term. Nowadays everything is a genocide. Sinking of Titanic was a genocide.

I think Coloroso should pick a hobby better suited to her credentials than writing about genocides and history.

The book is an embarrassment to her, why did she do it? I don't understand. Why belittle yourself willingly in front of the whole world? The book is so simple-minded that it is a disgrace to the paper it is printed on.

Coloroso is fluent in cliché-speak: "necessity is the mother of creativity," "us and them," "me, mine, more" etc.

She plugs, shamelessly, her previous work "The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander" which is the cliché of all clichés.

The idea is this: If you reward your children for good behaviour they will become genocideers.

"To begin to fathom genocide, the place to start is not with conflict but with bullying." No, Ms. Coloroso, the place to start is not bullying, the place to start is the inability to accept the equality of all genes (hence the term gene-ocide). Millions of Jewish people weren't murdered because the Germans were bullies as children. They were murdered because Nazis thought that German genes were better than the genes of the Jewish people. It happened because of "race," not because how Germans were treated when they were children.

Genocide has everything to do with race (genes) and nothing to do with any of your simplistic theories.

This book is an insult to 6 million innocent victims of the Holocaust.