The Terrorist Factory: ISIS, the Yazidi Genocide, and Exporting Terror by Father Patrick Desbois & Costel Nastasie. The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and know from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be “soldiers of God.” (272pp)
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Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick. Arn Chorn-Pond was 11 years old when the Communist Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, and his story is a catalog of the brutality of the next four years, when as much as one-fourth of the Cambodian population was executed or died of hunger, overwork and untreated disease. Arn’s story, retold by author Patricia McCormick as a novel for young adults, tells of the guile, resourcefulness, calculated alliances and, often, cruelty required to survive, and of the lasting trauma that leads its young subject to say at one point, “I am poison” and “I hurt everything I touch.” As a refugee Arn carries his nightmares, guilt and violent instincts with him to the United States, where he learns the healing power of tears and of speaking out — the kind of catharsis many survivors in Cambodia still avoid. (224pp)
by nothingtoseehere5678