Human Rights in The Books Store

Award-winning journalist David Batstone reveals the story of a new generation of 21st century abolitionists and their heroic campaign to put an end to human bondage. In his accessible and inspiring book, Batstone carefully weaves the narratives of activists and those in bondage in a way that not only raises awareness of the modern-day slave trade, but also serves as a call to action.

With 2007 bringing the 200th anniversary of the climax of the 19th century abolitionist movement, the world pays tribute to great visionary figures such as William Wilberforce of the United Kingdom and American Frederick Douglass for their remarkable strides toward framing slavery as a moral issue that people of good conscience could not tolerate. This anniversary serves not only as a commemorative date for battles won against slavery, but also as a reminder that slavery and bondage still persist in the 21st century. An estimated 27 million people around the globe suffer in situations of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation from which they cannot free themselves. Trafficking in people has become increasingly transnational in scope and highly lucrative. After illegal drug sales and arms trafficking, human trafficking is today the third most profitable criminal activity in the world, generating $31 billion annually. As many as half of all those trafficked worldwide for sex and domestic slavery are children under 18 years of age.

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society

Generation We explores the emerging power of the Millennial Generation, shows how they (and their supporters from other generations) are poised to change our nation and our world for the better, and lays out a powerful plan for progressive change that today s youth is ready to implement. Generation We presents for the first time the results of a major research study into the characteristics of the Millennial Generation, including an in-depth survey of 2,000 individuals and a series of twelve geographically- and demographically-diverse focus groups, all sponsored by author Eric Greenberg and conducted by Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications, one of the most respected research organizations in the United States. It s the essential guide to the values, dreams, and enormous potential of the Millennials, and could serve as a spark to help kindle the coming youth movement that will restore the damaged American dream.

The young members of Generation We are inheriting a world rife with war, environmental degradation, dysfunctional health and educational systems, dangerous dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil, creeping totalitarianism, diminished civil rights, and a fragile economy. Generation We believes that we must innovate our way out of this complex set of problems, discovering and implementing solutions that will work on a global scale and we need to do it soon.

Generation We suggests an agenda by which today s youth can help lead an American renaissance. As Greenberg and Weber show, the best way to launch the Millennial revolution is with Project FREE, a massive scientific and industrial program to move America beyond fossil fuels by inventing the next generation of non-carbon based energy a program that will save the environment, end our dependence on foreign oil, create millions of jobs, and jump-start a massive economic boom. Project FREE could be one of humankind s greatest achievements and a proud legacy for the Millennial generation.

While Don Cheadle was filming Hotel Rwanda, a new crisis had already erupted in Darfur, in nearby Sudan. In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the atrocities being committed there "genocide" -- and yet two years later things have only gotten worse. 3.5 million Sudanese are going hungry, 2.5 million have been displaced by violence, and 400,000 have died in Darfur to date.

Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century “atrocitarians”—some of the world’s first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.

Gary Bass shatters the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred years, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act. He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s, the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.

Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurring of imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today’s leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur—catastrophes that he maintains are neither inevitable nor traditional.

Timely and illuminating, Freedom’s Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.