peter young’s listopia

51) Brian Eno, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Michel Faber, Haifa Zangana, Not One More Death, 2006
Six highly succinct and distilled arguments against the Iraq War and the UK's involvement in it, also with a considerable amount of ire heaped on the veiled evil that is US foreign policy. The best and most beautifully presented piece is Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I'd almost go as far as saying this brief book is required reading on the Iraq conflict except that in too many places their opinions would benefit from footnotes. All royalties go to the Stop The War Coalition.

53) François Bizot, The Gate, 2000 [ RECOMMENDED BY ROGER LEVY ]
Bizot, a young French ethnologist in Cambodia studying Buddhist history, was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1971, but largely because of the trust he formed with Duch, his captor, was released three months later. Then after four more years when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Bizot was forced to become the intermediary between his former captors and the French Embassy, evacuating as many of his compatriots as possible to Thailand, while Duch went on to oversee the killing of twenty thousand Cambodians. Bizot recounts his experiences of thirty years ago in detail in a style that mostly seems stilted and formal throughout. The real horrors are carried out off-stage, and the emotional impact of the Killing Fields is saved for the all-too-brief epilogue. Nevertheless it's an engaging and highly personal memoir, and one from which the reader can gain a great deal of background into Cambodia's descent into hell.