An important contribution to modern French history.
The riveting tale of an episode, hardly known to Americans, that continues to affect French life and politics and raises profound moral issues.
One of the most searing moments of modern French history came after the liberation of Paris in 1944. The time to settle scores—between the defeated Vichy government, together with its French collaborators, and members of the Resistance and De Gaulle's liberating army, as well as the survivors and ghosts of French Jewry—had arrived. And that moment was encapsulated in the treason trial, conviction, and execution of the mordant anti-Semitic writer and Nazi sympathizer Robert Brasillach. Kaplan (Romance Studies/Duke Univ.; French Lessons: A Memoir, 1993) focuses her resonant work on the enduring question of the responsibility of writers and intellectuals to their societies. For the French, then and still debating their responsibility for Vichy and the extermination of thousands of French Jews, the question in 1944 was whether one can commit "political treason in writing, rather than in action.'' Kaplan's study, the first based upon all available sources, successfully resolves distortions in the earlier historical record and makes clear beyond all doubt Brasillach's role in inducing others to send innocents to their graves. Equally important, she exhumes the lives and roles of Brasillach's prosecutor and defense attorney, as well as the members of the jury that convicted him. With exemplary balance, she gives all their due (although, inexcusably, there are no photos, not even of the main characters). In the end, she judges Brasillach's execution an error because his martyrdom still fuels the French far right. But surely Albert Camus, no friend of collaborators, had the stronger and more noble case: that Brasillach's death was immoral because all capital punishment is immoral.
An important contribution to modern French history.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-226-42414-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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