Gary J. Bass writes the kind of history that lawyers and diplomats read with a pencil in hand. An American scholar of international law, human rights and the machinery of war crimes prosecution, he has taught at Princeton since 1999, where he holds the William P. Boswell chair in World Politics of Peace and War. He took both his first degree and his doctorate at Harvard.
Before academia he reported for The Economist, and the reporter’s instinct survives in his books: archives are used, but so are the sentences people actually spoke. The Blood Telegram, his account of Washington’s conduct during the 1971 atrocities in Bangladesh, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and permanently altered how that episode is discussed.
He writes for The New York Times among others, and his particular gift is holding legal detail and moral weight in the same paragraph without letting either collapse into the other. Few working historians are read as carefully by the people who make policy.
31 hours and 23 minutes
