Reviews for The Rights of Spring: A Memoir of Innocence Abroad

The average rating for The Rights of Spring: A Memoir of Innocence Abroad based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-17 00:00:00 Clinton Ehret A really excellent little book that is a condensed version of Kennedy's "important" (I use quotation marks as that is a quote from everybody who discusses it) larger work The Dark Sides of Virtue. It is a moment by moment deconstruction of a human rights mission to Uruguay he was a part of in the 1980s. He tries to recapture the uncertainty of a time where human rights was still developing as a field, and all the ambiguity of goals, competence, jurisdiction and effectiveness that that entails. He spends the majority of the time, however, questioning his own motives and his narrative construction of events- who really filled what role, for instance. Was Ana, the political detainee he interviewed, a total innocent telling the unvarnished truth? Was the warden a totally bad guy? What was his own role as a "witness" of atrocity while still trying to be a lawyer doing a job? How do you be a person in a situation where the boundaries of your role are so uncertain and so likely to get you into trouble if you overstep. There's wonderful stuff in here about the stories we tell ourselves and whether it is a betrayal of the whole movement to use peoples' pain to play white knight, or write a happy ending when for most people there will be no such thing. Some in my class (including the professor) felt that his self-doubt of the human rights movement (especially his narrative of its decline and fall) was published at a very interestingly good time and that his re-telling was a bit too close to marketing opportunism for their sakes. I didn't agree- I think this is a great, reflective little book that really challenges what the actual workings of human rights missions are like. He reminds us that there is no moral clarity and despite the "white knight" mission, there probably shouldn't be. Human rights is the industry of second best and there's always some failure in success- and the people giving the aid get something out of it. I do think that his disllusionment with humanitarianism as insufficiently pure these days is a bit extreme, but I loved the self-examination that he undertook to get to that point. Amazing.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-05 00:00:00 Barry L Veron Provides a very useful critique on the bureaucratisation of human rights in the international community; uses narrative style and personal experiences to illustrate an individual response of the human rights lawyer, this makes it much easier to read than the general variety of commentary upon human rights. However, because of this, the book is less useful to an academic, and the concerns raised remain very much unresolved by the end of the book.