Marvelous and absorbing ... Inimitable ... Sands is also a consummate storyteller, gently teasing out his heavy themes and the accompanying legal intricacies through the unforgettable details he unearths and the many people...who open up to him.
Remarkable ... It is the relentless pursuit of this hidden and repulsive past that gives 38 Londres Street its startling originality, turning it into a tour de force that extends its reach far beyond what we typically envisage from a book about human rights.
Emotionally powerful ... It’s also a reminder that, as a Chilean judge tells Sands at the end of the book, 'It is a fine thing to investigate for a personal reason.' All three of Sands’s books on immunity are a stirring testament to this truth.
Sands has interviewed all the key players, but this is not just a gripping behind-the-scenes court drama ... Sands’s book is the darkest of tales, but also a riveting piece of historical detective work, as finely plotted as any thriller.
Sands follows each twist in the double narrative with an impressive combination of moral clarity and judicious detachment ... It is Sands’s expertise in international law, coupled with a natural storyteller’s intuition for structure, that gives his latest book its understated power. A less skilful narrator might have lost the reader in a thicket of legal arguments, or glossed over nuance in pursuit of polemical urgency. That isn’t Sands’s style.
Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key figures, Sands builds suspense like the best of mystery writers ... A masterful and timely mix of history, journalism, and memoir.
Sands weaves a chilling transnational history of twentieth-century atrocity ... A profoundly humane examination of the legal, political, and ideological networks that make impunity possible ... What makes Sands’s account of this legal drama so compelling is the way he weaves it into both the story of democratic reconstruction in post-dictatorial South America and the broader trajectory of his long-running investigations into atrocity and impunity ... Sands examines these overlapping life histories and political narratives with sensitivity and clear eyes ... Through meticulous archival research, interviews, and vivid reporting...he allows readers to trace surprising—and damning—connections across time and place.
Sands makes his legal arguments come alive, partly with tricks (the book is dotted with often off-beat snapshots), partly by dramatizing his interviews with bit players in the plot, and partly by larding snippets of information about the dictator ... The flaw in an otherwise fascinating narrative is that the lives of Rauff and Pinochet are not quite as intertwined as Sands would like us to believe.
The most vivid parts of the book relate to Rauff. The former SS officer escaped western captivity, sailed to South America, and even briefly worked for Israeli and West German intelligence. He then ran a crab cannery in Patagonia — deploying the same mechanical efficiency with which he had killed Jews and others. Each year he celebrated Hitler’s birthday ... Parts of the book are long-winded. Regarding the Pinochet case, Sands has various over-clubby chats with old lawyers (a large proportion of these take place in Hampstead). Despite this, there is still much good detail ... This book makes the case that accountability is a worthy pursuit. The reader may also conclude that it is a very hard, very expensive and very partial consolation prize for what dictatorships do.
While Sands does not quite succeed in providing a definitive, provable link between Rauff and Pinochet in the carrying out of the executions and torture, he is informed by a judge that he almost certainly has enough to show 'that Rauff assisted Pinochet in facilitating the disappearances.' Sands’ book is particularly fascinating when re-tracing the Pinochet story, the first former head of state to be arrested in another country accused of crimes committed elsewhere, under the principle of universal jurisdiction ...
He has given us a comprehensive and comprehensible (given the legal issues) study of the steadily closing distance between impunity and immunity, although it’s unlikely that the despots of the world will pay. 38 Londres Street is a book of staggering erudition written with remarkable fluidity ... a book of history, reportage, moral investigation, memoir, and legal chronicle. The style borrows from a fast-paced thriller, obscuring the enormous research and enhancing the sheer unexpectedness of events like the ruling in the House of Lords.
