Customer Reviews

The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective

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This collection of essays has a wide focus and all are useful and clear in their discussions. The comparative essay on Cambodia and Egypt is an interesting approach. The essays are focussed not only on 20th century genocides but also colonial history and its resulting mass killings.

If you are interested in the study of genocide and theories of how a genocidal regime may rationalize its policies, then this book is a good choice for you. It's chock full of scholarly articles on theories concerning these matters, as well as how genocide should be defined, and other such intellectual material. If you're more interested in learning the details of individual genocides: how they were carried out, in-depth histories and case studies, then this is book will provide nothing for you to sink your teeth into. The articles within it frequently reference statistics from actual genocides and compare various aspects of different genocidal regimes, but never make any attempt to go beneath the surface. You'll learn nothing new from this book about any genocide that you couldn't have learned from just doing a Google search. Even the articles that are about specific events, like the killings in Guatemala, are mostly just full of heady social theory with statistics and facts concerning Guatemala as a backdrop. They never go into the specifics of how the killings were carried out, or specific incidents, or anything that might breathe just a little bit of life and humanity into the stuffy academic monologue. You may want to read this book if you're preparing to write a research paper on genocide, but it's definitely not something most people would read for pleasure.

This is a very fine collection of essays that examine genocide from the Holocaust to Stalin's Russia to East Timor. It tries to also examine how indigenous people have been subject to genocide, such as the Herrero in Southern Africa and how cultures that turned genocide had a history of such exclusion in their past, for instance in Japan.

THis is interesting and the essays show many statistics. But in this one has to wonder how exactly the authors are judging what a genocide is. For instance the casualties in East Timor were high over the years but not in any one year and in Yugoslavia the number of victims in Albania was very small and the number of victims in the conflict was equal on both sides.

This is always the problem books on genocide have: they don't know what to include. Why does this book call what has happaned in Ethiopia a genocide and compare it to Cambodia. In Cambodia, which was a genocide, there was not merely a genocide of minorities such as the Chinese, Vietnamese and Chams, but the majority of victims were actually Cambodian. Thus it is a very problematic subject and this doesn't provide a solution.

Seth J. Frantzman

It was a disaster. I ordered the book for my son's class at Auburn. I never got the book! When I tried to have it tracked, I was told it was through a 3rd party and could not be tracked! It said nothing on the order that it was not through the site posted. They kept telling me it would be here any day. He waited all month for his book, and did not have it for the test!! I will not ever use Amazon or this site for any books that need to be delivered in a timely manner. I now have to go through the process of turning in a claim!