Just in time for summer are several new books written by some of UW-Madison’s top scholars affiliated with the International Institute. The books are worth traveling with, wherever your vacation plans take you, and provide important perspectives on world history and current events.
Edward Friedman’s Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China serves as an indispensable guide to twentieth century Chinese history. In two books on genocide in Rwanda, Intimate Enemy and The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda, Scott Straus considers how the perpetrators of the 1995 genocide were “everyday people,” neighbors who became killers in an extermination campaign. David Leheny has written insightfully but also with considerable humor about today’s Japan in Think Global, Fear Local: Sex, Violence, and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan, and Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney poignantly describes an earlier period in Japanese history in Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers.
These books will be part of next fall’s “World Beyond our Borders” series co-sponsored by the Division of International Studies and Borders Books in Madison. For more information on the upcoming fall 2006 series, please click here. For a listing of books featured in the spring 2006 series, please click here.