"The Courage of Strangers is the memoir of a woman who helped create Human Rights Watch and bring about the fall of Communism - and in the process became free and independent herself." "After Jeri Laber earned a Master's degree in Russian studies at Columbia University, she became a part-time writer and editor and a full-time wife and mother. Then one day in 1973 she read an article about torture that altered her life and subsequently the lives of countless others around the world.".

"In The Courage of Strangers, Laber tells how she became a founder and the executive director of Helsinki Watch, which grew to be Human Rights Watch, one of the world's most influential organizations. She helped invent a new form of advocacy: that of the human rights investigator, both journalist and scholar with a passionate belief in freedom and justice.

Laber describes her secret trips across closed borders, where she met with some of the most courageous activists and dissidents of the time - Vaclav Havel, Yuri Orlov, Andrei Sakharov, Adam Michnik, Rita Klimova, Sergei Kovalev, and Larisa Bogoraz; her portraits of them reveal the human story behind the political headlines."--BOOK JACKET.