At the back of , Brooklyn Superhero Supplies, there was a book sale to raise money for an after-school writing program. I bought this to help them out, and got my karma reward when it turned out to be a detailed account of the work my best friend’s tiny non-profit organization did in Srebrenica. Physicians for Human Rights spent several years collecting forensic evidence from the mass graves so that each case could be prosecuted as a murder—and so that families could reclaim their dead kin.

Neuffer, a Boston Globe journalist, does a great job of explaining why justice matters after a genocide, why people shouldn’t just “move on”. She also explains how recent attempts to deliver that justice have been so ham-fisted.

A great follow-up to Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide”.

UPDATE: Caitriona tells me that Neuffer was killed in a car accident in Iraq in April 2003. She and her husband Dan remember Neuffer from their Bosnia days as a kind, warm person, unusual for a war reporter. I’d like to have met her.

De Botton is such a girly swot. His books have a lazy appeal, but as soon as I finish one I need to turn to some virile woodsman who lives a life outside books—Ed Abbey, say, or even David Quammen.

Terkel is one of the reasons I’ve gone off novels recently. It’s hard for someone whose job it is to sit alone with his thoughts in a room to make characters as vibrant as real people—and most of the contemporary novels I’ve picked up in the last few years seem too self-absorbed to even try. So I’ll turn to Studs to paint a picture of a city through its people. What a fine occupation. Go Studs!

Great subject matter, and it centers around two of my all-time favorite novels—Lolita and The Great Gatsby. But Nafisi’s own prose put me off. She’s addicted to adverbs, and her students never came to life through her romance-novel descriptions. I’m sure she’s a wonderful teacher, though—she made me want to re-read all the books she taught.

I found this on the street in Brooklyn a few years ago and thought it was about bereavement. It’s not. It’s about losses of all kinds, from Oedipal triangles to death.

I enjoyed it, though parts seem dated (it was written in the Reagan era.) Viorst’s women are long-suffering, passive creatures, who put up with disregard and infidelity from their men. I wonder what she makes of my generation, where the women keep demanding more than the baffled, gentle sons of feminism can give?

I was far too lazy and easily-intimidated to read this when it was assigned to me in college—Joyce’s own UCD—ten years ago. I wouldn’t have liked it then anyway. But it’s fabulous stuff, and much easier than I’d thought. The Nora biography helped.

V.g., if you can stand the late Sixties New Journalism style.

Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder, is on the board of my company, and turns out to be just the kind of thoughtful, modest billionaire you’d want next-door. Pierre, I think, would shovel snow from his sidewalk, and later go door-to-door to get the block association to sponsor stem-cell research. This book shows how the philosophy behind his early decisions shaped the company so strongly. Some fundamental Omidyar assumptions, which were not obvious to all at the time he started out:
People are basically good.
People are generally capable of working out disputes without god-like intervention.
Reputation is worth something in itself.
Transparency helps a system regulate itself.
People value what they pay for more than stuff that comes for free.

Come to think of it, these notions share something with the constitution-hashing I’m reading about in Alistair Cooke’s book.

Is this stuff as fascinating to someone who hasn’t been through the startup world? I’m a sucker for little company stories, whether they make it or not. This one I read it over a couple of evenings. Part of the fun was a villain of the piece was Jerry Kaplan, himself author of the classic baby company story Startup. And another part was reading it the week after I sat in a board meeting with the eBay founder, a director of my company. I was glad this hadn’t shaped my opinion in advance, and more glad to find that the self-effacing good guy of this book is real.

More business trip reading from the ENTJs over at Microsoft.