Books like Working in the Killing Fields by Howard Ball

A comprehensive, updated account of Cambodia’s history from French colonial rule through the Khmer Rouge era and post-1979 period, focusing on key figures such as Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

There is no scientist in the world like Dr. Bill Bass. A pioneer in forensic anthropology, Bass created the world's first laboratory dedicated to the study of human decomposition—three acres of land on a hillside in Tennessee where human bodies are left to the elements. His research at "the Body Farm" has revolutionized forensic science, helping police crack cold cases and pinpoint time of death. But during a forensics career that spans half a century, Bass and his work have ranged far beyond the gates of the Body Farm. In this riveting book, the bone sleuth explores the rise of modern forensic science, using fascinating cases from his career to take readers into the real world of C.S.I. Some of Bill Bass's cases rely on the simplest of tools and techniques, such as reassembling—from battered torsos and a stack of severed limbs—eleven people hurled skyward by an explosion at an illegal fireworks factory. Other cases hinge on sophisticated techniques Bass could not have imagined when he began his career: harnessing scanning electron microscopy to detect trace elements in knife wounds; and extracting DNA from a long-buried corpse, only to find that the female murder victim may have been mistakenly identified a quarter-century before. In Beyond the Body Farm, readers will follow Bass as he explores the depths of an East Tennessee lake with a twenty-first-century sonar system, in a quest for an airplane that disappeared with two people on board thirty-five years ago; see Bass exhume fifties pop star "the Big Bopper" to determine what injuries he suffered in the plane crash that killed three rock and roll legends on "the day the music died"; and join Bass as he works to decipher an ancient Persian death scene nearly three thousand years old. Witty and engaging, Bass dissects the methods used by homicide investigators every day, leading readers on an extraordinary journey into the high-tech science that it takes to crack a case.

The war in Bosnia has confounded all our expectations. The end of the Cold War, most people imagined in 1989 and 1990, signaled the end of conflict in Europe. What Western Europeans already enjoyed - peace, prosperity, a common market - would be extended to countries like Yugoslavia. Like their neighbors in Croatia and Serbia, Bosnians - Croat, Serb, and Muslim alike - had the same expectations of the post-Communist era. Theirs was already a consumer culture, fueled by ever larger waves of tourists. In 1984, the Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo. That event seemed to presage the rosiest of futures. . But when the Yugoslavian state began to collapse, Bosnia collapsed with it. Ferocious ethnic and religious antagonisms - held beneath the surface by decades of Communist rule - were seized upon by ex-Communist politicians now turned nationalist, who, desperate to hold on to power, sold them with inceasing propaganda to a nervous population terrified as the civic order they had grown up with fell apart. In 1991, war broke out in Croatia. In April 1992, it came to Bosnia. In reality, it was more slaughter than war. The siege of Sarajevo has gone on longer than any siege in modern history. And, as the world stood by, for the third time in twentieth-century Europe a small minority, this time not the Armenians or the Jews but the Muslims of Bosnia, underwent a genocide. In a shocking and deeply disturbing tour de force, David Rieff - perhaps America's most acclaimed chronicler of displaced people, of lives in flux - journeys into the center of the war in Bosnia, a slaughterhouse made even more horrible by the failure of the West and its surrogate, the United Nations, to do anything to stop the genocide. Rieff follows the civilians, not the fighting. He vividly documents the way the Bosnians moved from their initial shock that this fate of murder and loss was really to be theirs, to their belief that the West, the United States in particular, would help them, to their ultimate, terrifying certainty that they would be left alone to their fate.

In this passionate yet carefully documented book, Sells draws on Balkan literature, unpublished United Nations reports, Internet postings, and personal contacts in the region to reveal for the first time the central role played by religious mythology and stereotyping in the Bosnian tragedy. Sells, himself of Serbian American descent, traces the cultural logic of genocide to the manipulation by contemporary nationalists of the ancient battle of Kosovo - in which the fallen Serb prince Lazar is viewed as a Christ figure and Muslims are portrayed as "Christ-Killers" who must be exterminated before the crucified Serb nation can be resurrected. He shows how intellectuals and clergy created a "Christoslavic" nationalism that viewed converts to Islam as traitors to the Slavic race and marked out their descendants for destruction. Sells also reveals how Western policy makers rewarded the perpetrators of the genocide and punished the victims. He concludes by explaining how the multireligious society of Bosnia served as a bridge between Christendom and Islam, symbolized by the now-destroyed ancient bridge at Mostar. In addition, he makes clear what is at stake, in the effort to preserve Bosnia, for the entire post-cold war world and especially for multireligious societies such as our own.

Elizabeth Neuffer reports on genocide and its aftermath in Bosnia and Rwanda, tracing the parallel quests for justice through international tribunals and personal testimonies of victims, perpetrators, and those who bring war crimes to the world stage.