Muslims and the Rwandan Hutu militias’ slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsi. This vivid and gripping work of American history doubles as a prosecutor’s brief: time and again, Power recounts, although the United States had the knowledge and the means to stop genocide abroad, it has not acted. Worse, it has made a resolute commitment to not acting. Washington’s record, Power ruefully observes, is not one of failure, but of success.”

–Laura Secor (The New York Times Book Review)

2002

Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter

“… an exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham’s struggle … expertly follows the tangled threads of culpability until they reveal what she calls ‘the long tradition of enmeshment between law enforcers andpolitical decision.

As Harvard Prof. Leila Ahmed explained in “A Quiet Revolution,” Muslim women began unveiling in the early 20th century. At the time, foreign forces had taken control of much of the Arab world, and occupiers sought to rescue Muslim women from what they saw as “the oppression of Islam.” At the same time, the forces of modernity encouraged many women to bare their heads. “Unveiling,” Ahmed explains, “would become ever more clearly the emblem of an era of new hopes and desires, and of aspirations for modernity: the possibility of education and the right to work for both women and men, and of equal opportunity and advancement based on effort and merit.”

That began to change in the 1970s. At that time, Arab leaders like the Muslim Brotherhood