Extraordinary Evil - Hardcover

Barbara Coloroso

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670066044 ISBN 13: 9780670066049

Publisher: Viking Canada, 2007

Synopsis

From best-selling author Barbara Coloroso comes a timely and essential book about genocide. Through an examination of three clearly defined genocides — the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, and the European Holocaust — Coloroso deconstructs the causes and consequences, both to its immediate victims and to the fabric of the world at large, and proposes the conditions that must exist in order to eradicate this evil from the world. Coloroso is well known for her best-selling books that explore why children bully. In Extraordinary Evil she builds upon that research to explain why the impulse to bully is mirrored by the act of genocide. By linking the psychology of the bully to the motivation that leads a community to murder, Coloroso provides devastating and vital insight into why people kill their neighbors. Based on the author's 15 years of research and extensive travel, Extraordinary Evil is an urgently needed work in an age when acts of genocide seem to occur more frequently and are in the public's consciousness more than ever before.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Coloroso is an internationally recognized speaker and author in the areas of parenting, teaching, school discipline, nonviolent conflict resolution, reconciliatory justice, and grieving. Her bestselling books include Parenting through Crisis; The Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystander; and Kids Are Worth It!.

A former Franciscan nun, she now lives with her husband and three teenagers in Littleton, Colorado.

From Publishers Weekly

Placing genocidal campaigns at the extreme on a spectrum of bullying that begins in socialization's earliest stages, Coloroso (The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander) seeks to strengthen the legal and moral prevention of genocide and to improve humanitarian intervention. Analyzing the plight of the Armenians; the Jews, Roma and Sinti; and Rwandan Tutsis, she marshals solid studies, victim and perpetrator testimonies, as well as her own expertise as a nationally recognized speaker on conflict resolution. Her discussion of problems of definition, political will, and social and psychological persuasion are useful, but her argument can be tedious, despite graphic and distressing detail. Drawing heavily and only semiconvincingly on her earlier child-centered work, Coloroso has a tendency to rely on Power Point–style lists, brusquely contextualized quotations and even a cartoon-illustrated flowchart of bullies and their enablers. Her generalizations can be disturbing—for example, when she suggests Rwanda's colonial past plays no role in the current violence, despite contrary arguments from Mahmood Mamdani and others not cited here. Coloroso's checklist of genocidal prerequisites can also blur into other acts of state-sponsored or condoned aggression and exploitation. This book provides entry into a vital dialogue, but should be considered at best a beginning. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Canada
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670066044
• ISBN 13: 9780670066049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1