For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.
A massively detailed account of the good bureaucrats who follow orders and thereby kill millions.
British arts and political activist Gretton has long puzzled over the worse angels of our nature. In this long, dense narrative, the author begins by recounting such things as a communications manager’s protest that she and her colleagues have nothing to do with the evil their corporation has undeniably committed; a flash of conversation with an interviewer of Nazi architect Albert Speer who heard him confess, “I loved machines more than people’; and news of the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist who tried to stop oil conglomerates from devastating his homeland. These all have in common a struggle between violator and victim largely enacted by “desk murderers,” a term that traces loosely to Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its coinage of the more famous phrase “the banality of evil.” The evil these people commit is banal indeed, but the crimes are extraordinary. Over the course of hundreds of pages, Gretton tells stories of Nazi functionaries such as Eichmann himself, presiding over “a bafflingly detailed discussion over exactly how Jewishness is to be defined.” That definition, of course, would condemn millions to death, a process begun by the legal maneuverings of another team of Nazi desk murderers to deprive German and then all subject Jews of their citizenship—and stateless people are susceptible to awful state crimes, as are the anonymous inhabitants of faraway lands. That eventually brings Gretton to the torturers of the George W. Bush administration and, beyond, drone pilots and others who “can stroke their child’s sleeping face in the night, and in the morning send the email that kills people they have never met.” The text, which is one of a planned two volumes, is too long by half and wildly diffuse, with digressions into philosophy, the psychology of storytelling, and the like. However, the subject is tremendously important in a time grown ever darker—and ever more reminiscent of the darkest days in modern world history.
For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-17437-8
Page Count: 1104
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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