Foreign correspondent Lamb's (Farewell Kabul) latest book describes interviews with victims of war-time rape conducted throughout the 2000s and across the globe. Sixteen short chapters weave personal stories with historical background: the rise of IS in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Nigeria along with the Rohigya genocide in Myanmar, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, the Bosnian War, Argentina's "Dirty War," the Congo Wars, and World War II. Offering a crash-course in recent history and telling the stories of women as young as four and as old as 89, the book also argues that rape is "the world's most neglected war crime." Lamb draws on the work of lawyers and scholars as well as her own reporting to argue that rape, often described by victims as worse than death, is used as a deliberate military strategy but is rarely tried in court due to the false belief that it is ancillary to the goals of terror and ethnic cleansing. VERDICT Dizzying for its historical breadth and emotional strain, this book is nevertheless essential reading. Readers interested in human rights will stick through the highly readable but earth-rattling chapters for the sake of their larger purpose; namely, to give voice to people who have felt erased.—Jennifer Flaherty, Univ. of California, Berkeley

Journalist Lamb (Farewell, Kabul) delivers a heart-wrenching study of rape as a weapon of war. Interweaving the harrowing testimonies of contemporary women in war-torn regions such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (where a 2010 UN report concluded that 1,000 women were being raped per day) with the history of the practice, Lamb documents the experiences of Korean and Japanese "comfort women" during WWII, sexual assaults committed by Red Army soldiers against German women, gang rapes during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, rape camps in the Bosnian War, and the 2014 kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram. Only in rare occasions, such as an international tribunal on the Rwandan genocide, has rape been recognized as a war crime. Most countries, she writes, bury these parts of their histories, but "for there to be an end to rapists' impunity there must be an end to silence." In one particularly moving interview, a Congolese woman who was raped so severely that she is in permanent pain and unable to bear children asks Lamb to "please be our voice." This harrowing account bears powerful witness to a worldwide tragedy. (Sept.)