In Oscar pools, it was always a good bet to pick the film about the Holocaust in the Documentary category. Who can vote against the Holocaust? So of the three finalists, I thought Bettina Stangneth's Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, translated by Dr. Ruth Martin, was a likely winner. But I also thought Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History was the best history I had read in years, and surely the most ambitious of the three finalists.
So if it's the League of Nations instead, The Guardians ought to be a pretty good book. This is what Times Higher Ed said of it -- it seems to have been thinly reviewed so far. Susan Pedersen turns out to be Canadian-born and a prof at Columbia in New York City.
