100th Monkey Books

Historical Conscience & the Human Imperative



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Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace
Bernie Glassman (1998) 217pages

Bearing Witness is a book rich with practical and spiritual wisdom for making peace in our hearts and in the world. In it, Bernie Glassman tells how and why he was moved to start the Zen Peacemaker Order and offers powerful teaching stories that illustrate ways of making peace one mom,ent at a time, no matter how difficult things appear to be. In his practice of engaged spirituality, Glassman, takes people into situations where they can experience problems first-hand, into circumstances so overwhelming - such as living on the streets of New York City or meditating on the crime of the century at Auschwitz - that they are forced to religuish the comfort of their familiar view of the world. Out of these actions have come the three tenets of the order: letting go of fixed ideas, healing ourselves and others, and bearing witness to whatever is taking place within us and right before our eyes. (Bell Tower)



The Hidden Wound
Wendell Berry (1989) 137pages

It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings....For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound - a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life....I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children. Perhaps this is only wishful thinking; perhaps such a thing is not to be done by one man, or in one generation. Surely a man would have to be almost dangerously proud to think himself capable of it. And so maybe I am really saying only that I feel an obligation to make the attempt, and that I know if I fail to make at least the attempt I forfeit any right to hope that the world will become better than it is now. - from the author's 1st chapter (North Point)



The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War I
Iris Chang (1997) 290pages

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,00 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered-a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written the definitive history of this horrifying episode. "The Rape of Nanking" tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone which saved almost 300,00 Chinese. Among the heroes was the German John Rabe, a Nazi, whose diaries Chang discovered and whom she calls the "Oskar Schindler of China". More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, "The Rape of Nanking" analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. It also tells of the concerted effort during the Cold War on the part of the West and even China to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. (Penguin)



An Uninterrupted Life (Diaries, 1941-1943) and Letters from Westerbork
Etty Hillesum (1914-43) 376pages

When we pick up Etty Hillesum's diaries and letters today, we knew from the outset what will come at their tragic end. And yet, to start reading them is to be jolted into fresh surprise. All the writings she left behind were composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, but they resist being read primarily in its dark light. Rather, their abiding interest lies in the light-filled mind that pervades them and in the astonishing internal journey they chart. The trajectory of that journey echoes classical accounts of spiritual transformations; but Etty's pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual young woman - it was idiosyncratic, individual, and recognizably modern. - from the Foreword by Eva Hoffman (Owl / Henry Holt, 1996)


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