A knowledgeable, stringent return to the record and scrutiny of “good neutrality.”
A history of the failure of the “neutral” guardians of humanity in a time of crisis and war.
Steinacher (History and Judaic Studies/Univ. of Nebraska; Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice, 2011, etc.) manages to be evenhanded in this study of the Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross and its mission and leaders during World War II. Upon its founding in 1863 by Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, who was horrified by the slaughter and treatment of the wounded on the battlefields of Italy, the ICRC joined the larger humanitarian movement galvanized by Florence Nightingale, Franz Lieber, and, later, Clara Barton, among others, to ameliorate conditions for the wounded and POWs. These efforts led to the first Geneva Convention (1864) and establishment of other red cross organizations, such as the American Red Cross. While they “drew heavily on the Judeo-Christian idea of caritas, the importance of performing works of mercy and charity,” the movement spread beyond the Western world, emerging in Israel as the Red Star of David and in the Ottoman Empire as the Red Crescent. Steinacher focuses mostly on the ICRC’s pro-German stance during World War II and its “silence on the Holocaust.” The author reveals damaging research regarding the political ambitions and behind-the-scene machinations of ICRC vice president Carl J. Burckhardt, whose virulent anti-communism alienated the Soviet Union and whose anti-Semitic pronouncements outraged Jews. Steinacher cites the figure of 320,000 refugees admitted to Switzerland, “mostly made up of non-Jewish refugees.” The German Red Cross was deeply Nazified, and thus the ICRC leadership “learned early on of Nazi plans to murder European Jews” yet did nothing. Moreover, the ICRC’s emphasis on German POWs and its lax policy of issuing travel documents to escaping Nazis and collaborators earned the opprobrium of the world, paving the way for a showdown with the Swedish Red Cross at the 17th International Red Cross Conference in Stockholm in August 1948.
A knowledgeable, stringent return to the record and scrutiny of “good neutrality.”Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-870493-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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