Provocative—and timely in these France-bashing days, certain to prompt learned commentary.
A searching inquiry into the behavior of ordinary French people under Vichy and Nazi rule—behavior that defies the easy categories of “collaborator” and “resister.”
The French, writes Gildea (History/Oxford Univ.), “have never faced up to their wartime past in any sustained and systematic way,” and so such categories remain current, even if they have little explanatory power. Overall, he writes, the German occupation was far from brutal for most ordinary French, who made do and, in the main, devoted themselves to the ordinary concerns of putting food on the table rather than directly resisting, or directly aiding, the Nazi overlords. French society became atomized as a consequence; in particular, rural communities deliberately isolated themselves the more authoritarian the Vichy government became, turning to the black market and resisting mostly in economic matters—by, for instance, evading taxes and keeping “resources out of the hands of the Germans unless the Germans were prepared to offer black-market prices.” For most French, Vichy was not quite as authoritarian as it was later made out to be: Gildea argues that it was incoherent, unable to control either the economy or society, and riddled with corruption and special interests. And the formally organized, Communist-dominated resistance was similarly ineffectual; Gildea writes that the Allied bombings of French and German cities were far more effective in weakening the German machine than were the occasional assassinations and acts of sabotage of resistance cells. Most ordinary French people, especially in the countryside, gave the organized resistance little direct support, at least in part because they mistrusted the Communists. Most, too, Gildea suggests, did not blink when their Jewish neighbors were deported—but mainly because the story that the Jews were merely being drafted as laborers was widely accepted, and not because of any particular widespread hatred for them.
Provocative—and timely in these France-bashing days, certain to prompt learned commentary.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6630-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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