Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend books or articles about human rights. Today UUSC President and CEO William F. Schulz recommends the book The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

A superb description of the power of shaming. Appiah describes how dueling, foot-binding in China, and slavery were ended by collective action and how, in our own day, honor killings might be, too.

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend books or articles about human rights. Today, UUSC Manager for Environmental Justice Patricia Jones recommends Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues, by Catharine A. MacKinnon.

One of the leading voices on treating crimes against women as crimes of war, this book is about the long way we still have to go in the field of formal human rights and women's rights. It is five years old, but good as a retrospective on the work of this great voice for women's human rights. 

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend books or articles about human rights. Today, Senior Associate for Economic Justice Ariel Jacobson recommends A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power.

This book chronicles the repeated failures of United States political leaders who have been faced with responding to genocides around the world. Disturbing and eye-opening, it calls on us to hold our policy makers accountable.

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend books or articles about human rights. Today, UUSC Assistant for Member Development Kate Wallace recommends A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by Mary Ann Glendon.

This book is a fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes politics that led to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For me, the most enlightening part of the story was the explanation of cultural perspectives of the diplomats who negotiated the UDHR and disagreed on often surprising parts of the document.

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend books or articles about human rights. Today, UUSC Manager for Environmental Justice Patricia Jones shares recommendations from other leaders in the field.

Paul Schwartz is legislative director for Clean Water Action, a leader of the movement for environmental justice and water in our country, and a Unitarian Universalist. He suggests reading the 2009 scientific article “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring a Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” published by a collaboration of researchers and available from the Stockholm Resilience Center.

The article describes the nine planetary boundaries that we must not cross to prevent catastrophic global natural systems change. Climate disruption is only one of the nine — but seven of the nine involve water. See the videos and related web articles.

And if you are a science geek, read the scientific article itself!

Paul Schwartz is a water theologian, in my view, and you can't go wrong by taking his advice on things to read! It is a good thing that Paul; Valerie Nelson of the Water Alliance; the Stockholm Resiliency Center; and colleagues around the world are mapping out potential solutions — real-life, real-time solutions — to avert crossing these thresholds.

On the Water Alliance web page, watch the short and longer videos on the “new water paradigm” they are working on, which impressed the U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation during her recent mission to the United States in March. The Water Alliance also has a Restoring the Water Commons report that links the planetary boundaries to the new thinking in water.

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend one of his or her favorite books about human rights. Today, UUSC Senior Associate for Economic Justice Ariel Jacobson recommends The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, by Rinku Sen with Fekkak Mamdouh.

This book tells the story of Fekkak Mamdouh, codirector of UUSC partner the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC). Mamdouh, along with many of his coworkers, lost his job as a waiter at the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. His experiences of injustice as an immigrant and a restaurant worker led him to help found ROC to serve as a voice for workers in one of the fastest growing industries in the country.

Each Friday throughout the summer, a UUSC staff member will recommend one of his or her favorite books about human rights. Today, UUSC Senior Associate for Media and Public Affairs Dick Campbell recommends Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

If it wasn't so fresh in our minds, you might think this book is a fictional tale of human-rights outrages committed in the name of disaster relief and the war against terror. But here is the true story, told in a relatively unbiased journalistic tone, of a respected Syrian-American businessman and his Muslim family whose real-life experiences capture the essence of the governmental mismanagement, negligence, and racism in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

After his wife Kathy and their children leave their flooded New Orleans home to stay with relatives in Arizona, Abdulrahman Zeitoun stays behind for several days in his rowboat to rescue stranded and vulnerable survivors. For his efforts, he is arrested and held incommunicado for weeks in a makeshift maximum-security prison on suspicion of being a terrorist. Read the book to get the full suspense-filled drama filled with tragic consequences.