When Meron’s native Poland was invaded in 1939, he writes in this impressive memoir, “Nazi Germany brought an apocalyptic change in my life: from sweet, uneventful, pampered childhood to the horrors of fleeing from monsters.” Seven years later, having fled those monsters, he arrived in Israel in 1946. “I was nearly 16 years old, with no Hebrew, no English, no algebra, no geometry; a total ignoramus.” Meron quickly made up for lost time. After serving in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he entered law school in Jerusalem, successfully applied to Harvard University, earning a doctorate in international law, and joined the Israeli government as a legal adviser. Meron moved to the U.S.—teaching law at New York University, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley—and served as a judge and president of international criminal tribunals. He retired in 2019 at age 89. As Meron notes, international law deals with war, genocide, atrocities, and torture—he presided over cases involving crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Since no agency enforces international law, however, great powers, including the U.S., routinely ignore it. Meron writes well, but a lifetime in government has produced a text dotted with excerpts from documents, letters, and speeches that might not fully engage readers. What resonates the most are his personal reflections, as when he writes about the death of his wife, Monique. “I had a rough childhood, losing my mother, brother and most of my family to the Holocaust. Perhaps it was the chaos of wartime, perhaps my emotional reserves had been drained or the survival instinct was too dominating, but the pain of losing my family was nothing compared with the shock, grief, despair and total loneliness I felt when Monique left me….Perhaps this is the price one must pay for true love.”