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Title details for East West Street by Philippe Sands - Available

East West Street

On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes against Humanity"

by Philippe Sands
Philippe Sands
Audiobook
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When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.Part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller, Philippe Sands guides us between past and present as several interconnected stories unfold in parallel. The first is the hidden story of two Nuremberg prosecutors who discover, only at the end of the trials, that the man they are prosecuting, once Hitler's personal lawyer, may be responsible for the murder of their entire families in Nazi-occupied Poland, in and around Lviv. The two prosecutors, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, were remarkable men, whose efforts led to the inclusion of the terms crimes against humanity and genocide in the judgement at Nuremberg, with their different emphasis on the protection of individuals and groups. The defendant was no less compelling a character: Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, and governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland.A second strand to the book is more personal, as Sands traces the events that overwhelmed his mother's family in Lviv and Vienna during the Second World War and led his grandfather to leave his wife and daughter behind as war came to Europe. At the heart of this book is an equally personal quest to understand the roots of international law and the concepts that have dominated Sands' work as a lawyer. Eventually he finds unexpected answers to his questions about his family in this powerful meditation on the way memory, crime, and guilt leave scars across generations.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 24, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781504714709
      • File size: 415145 KB
      • Duration: 14:24:53

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      David Rintoul proves to be a reasonable narrator for this production. As law professor Sands delved into the birth of the terms "genocide" and "crime against humanity" in a legal context related to the Holocaust, he never expected that the story would dovetail with his own family history. Rintoul smoothly interjects various foreign terms into the narration. However, he seems a bit more removed from the prose than the sections Sands himself narrates at the beginning and the end. With a crisp English accent and light rasp, Sands illuminates meaning and emphasis with his narration, enhancing understanding by teasing out nuance. The contrast is clear: While Rintoul is communicating the material, Sands is feeling it. L.E. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 4, 2016
      Sands (Torture Team), a human rights lawyer and professor of international law at University College London, takes readers on a labyrinthine journey into the personal histories of three men whose lives were forever altered by the Nuremberg trials of October 1946. Two of them—Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht—were founding luminaries of the new field of international human rights law; the third, Hans Frank, was Hitler’s personal legal counsel. Sands intertwines their stories with his own tragic family history, and seeks to illuminate the guiding principles of humanitarian law while unearthing the forgotten stories of the men who fought for its establishment in the wake of Nazi devastation. Part detective story and part heart-wrenching family history, the teeming narrative is anchored in the Ukrainian city of L’viv (alternately Lwów, L’vov, or Lemberg), hometown of Lemkin and Lauterpacht, and an emblem of the changing face of 20th-century Europe. Yet despite this attention to place, the book feels curiously unmoored, with the personalities and ambitions of its three main characters getting lost under a glut of biographical detail. Sands clearly revels in discovering long-lost family secrets; unfortunately, he also loses sight of the innovations in legal theory that Lemkin and Lauterpacht helped usher in, the ostensible focus on which is arguably the book’s most original aspect.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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