PHILIPPE SANDS is an international lawyer and a professor of law at University College London. He is the author of Lawless World and Torture Team and is a frequent commentator on CNN and the BBC World Service. Sands lectures around the world and has taught at New York University and been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, the University of Melbourne, and the Université de Paris I (Sorbonne). In 2003 he was appointed a Queen’s Counsel. He lives in London, England.
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
“A monumental achievement . . . a profoundly personal account of
the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, told with
love, anger and precision.” —John le Carré
“Sands proceeds in the manner of certain historians . . . he also
works in the manner of the author of thrillers. . . . In Sands’s
history, as in all great novels, we encounter characters who,
though seemingly secondary, are essential to the plot . . . And all
the while Sands works in the way of artists like Filippo Lippi, who
painted himself into the corner of his ‘Coronation of the Virgin’
and ‘The Funeral of Saint Stephen.’ . . . The result is a
narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented. . . . We have in Sands’s
East West Street a machine of power and beauty that should not be
ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere who would
believe that there are irreparable crimes whose adjudication should
not stop at the border. . . . Barack Obama and his successors would
be well advised to move to the top of their reading lists this
account of the birth, amid the darkest conceivable shadows, of an
unprecedented body of rights-based law, whose application has
scarcely begun.” —Bernard-Henri Lévy, New York Times Book Review
(cover review)
“Sands is a fine writer and sets his scenes so compellingly and
earnestly that his enterprise succeeds. . . . Engrossing, luminous
and moving.” —Samuel Moyn, The Wall Street Journal
“Remarkable sleuthing.” —Christopher R. Browning, The New York
Review of Books
“An intimate and important tale . . . vivid . . . engaging. . . . A
kind of mystery-solving journey . . . remarkable.” —John Tirman,
The Washington Post
“A tour de force . . . penetrating. . . . A pillar of the emerging
genre of third-generation investigation into the legacy of the
European Jewish apocalypse . . . This is a history that is both
personal and universal. . . . Equal parts legal scholarship, memoir
and multitude of mysteries, told with admirable suspense and
elocution. . . . Here we find both the detail of concepts and the
detail of personal lives and geographies. . . . Sands acts as
archivist and archaeologist, traveler and historian—but also as
horrified observer.” —Sarah Wildman, Jewish Daily Forward
“Supremely gripping. . . . Sands has produced something
extraordinary. . . . Sands tells it not just as history but as a
family memoir, a detective thriller and a meditation on the power
of memory . . . Written with novelistic skill, its prose
effortlessly poised, its tone perfectly judged, the book teems with
life and high drama . . . One of the most gripping and powerful
books imaginable.” —Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
“Remarkable . . . a voyage of discovery . . . a riveting odyssey. .
. . Sands elicits the most extraordinary revelations from his
subjects.” —Isabel Hull, London Review of Books
“A rare and unusual event: a book about international law that
makes you want to keep reading.” —Cullen Murphy, Vanity Fair
“Outstanding. . . . Consistently intriguing. . . . A fusion of
personal and professional interest, with Sands delving into his
family’s cordoned-off past to unearth concealed truths and trace
the circumstances that led to the birth of his chosen field of
humanitarian law. . . . Powerful and poignant, but also original .
. . Ultimately, Sands’s multifaceted book stands triumphantly
alone. It even-handedly charts four separate lives and skillfully
explores a beleaguered city with blurred borders. . . . It
amplifies the roar of history, dramatizes the depravity of, and the
moral struggle against, what Primo Levi called the “infernal order”
that is Nazism. . . . It is a fact-finding mission, a gripping
courtroom drama, a tale, ultimately and cathartically, of good
triumphing over evil. In Sands’s pages, many beautifully adorned
with photos, maps, letters—evidence—we see the piece-by-piece
reconstruction of a lost world, and the development of ideas that
would help safeguard a new one.” —Malcolm Forbes, New Republic
“A compelling family memoir intersects with the story of the Jewish
legal minds who sowed the seeds for human rights law at the
Nuremberg trials . . . important and engrossing. . . . The surprise
is that even when charting the complexities of law, Sands’s writing
has the intrigue, verve and material density of a first-rate
thriller. . . . He can magic whole histories of wartime heroism out
of addresses eight decades old. Or, chasing the lead of a faded
photograph, he can unearth possible alternate grandparents and
illicit liaisons to be verified only by DNA tests. . . .
Exceptional.” —Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian
“Vivid and readable. . . . East West Street weaves lives together
in a kind of collective biography of a generation . . . remarkable
. . . compelling . . . moving and powerful.” —Mark Mazower,
Financial Times
“A story of heroes and loss. . . . An outstanding book; a moving
history [that] at times, reads like a detective story . . . Sands’s
greatest achievement is the way he moves between his family story
and the lives of Lauterpacht and Lemkin and how he brings their
complex work to life. . . . This is the best kind of intellectual
history . . . a clear, astonishing story.” —David Herman, New
Statesman
“Gripping, profound and deeply personal. . . . Excellent.” —Mark
Harrison, Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
“Remarkable . . . vivid . . . complex and gripping . . . East West
Street is a fascinating and revealing book, for the things it
explains: the origins of laws that changed our world, no less.
Thoughtful, and compassionate, and important.” —Daniel Hahn, The
Spectator
“In East West Street, Philippe Sands brings all the power of his
formidable intellect, his inquisitive spirit and his emotional
imagination to bear on a complicated tangle of personal, legal and
European history. In a gripping narrative that is tender yet
dispassionate, intensely felt and meticulously researched, Sands
uncovers the surprising affinities and divergences among the
parallel lives of three men, two celebrated, one unknown, whose
struggles, sorrows, accomplishments and defeats, large and small,
help us to understand and, more, to feel the mittel-European
civilization their lives embodied, a whole world that was destroyed
and reinvented within the span of a single lifetime.”
—Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay
“In a triumph of astonishing research, Sands has brilliantly woven
together several family stories which lead to the great denouement
at the Nuremberg tribunal. No novel could possibly match such an
important work of truth.” —Antony Beevor (English Military
Historian)
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