Billing itself as the first English-language history devoted to the Japanese Army's 1937 massacre in China's capital, this slight account will by no means be the last word. Repeated references to Schindler's List point to the problem with this overdigested version of the past: It reads like a treatment for a probably inevitable cinema version of the hideous incident. Its economical, blandly shocking anecdotes of crimes against humanity and its cardboard heroes suggest scenes ready-made for screenwritten history. Thus, while rigorous in its moral earnestness, the book is inadequate as a history. After a minimal background chapter on Japanese militarism, Chang, a freelance journalist, describes the Japanese assault on Nanking. The specifics are deeply horrific: Over a period of several months Japanese soldiers killed approximately a quarter of a million Chinese, almost all of them noncombatants, including the elderly, women, and children. But the potential ingredients of a skillfully woven narrative are separated here into lifeless clumps of facts—catalogues of atrocities by kind; tiny summaries of topics of significant contextual interest, like foreign intelligence concerning the massacre; and probably gripping oral recollections flattened into clunky prose (``of the hundreds of people killed that day . . . Tang was the only survivor''). Chang tells only as much as one needs to know to indignantly draw the familiar lessons for humanity—``the frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into passive spectators to the unthinkable.'' What's needed is to vivify such truths with intense historical reality. Chang fails because she rushes to simplify complex events and to universalize what happened at the expense of a careful, comprehensive appreciation of a world violently destroyed. (photos, not seen) (First serial to Newsweek)
Pub Date: Dec. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-06835-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
A compendium of elegy, emotive description, and thorough research capturing past and present Jewish life in East-Central Europe. Freelance journalist Gruber (Rescue: The Exodus of Ethiopian Jews, 1987, etc.) walks us through what used to be the core of Jewish civilization in Europe. Today, fewer than 120,000 Jews live in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, a region once home to nearly 5,000,000 Jews. Between the fall of 1989 and the summer of 1993, Gruber visited the area in an attempt both to recreate the shattered past and to present a contemporary picture of the survivors' world. Her personal reflections often distract us from the subject, but her archival finds and the testimonies she has elicited from survivors and gentile neighbors offer a fascinating glimpse into largely unexplored areas of Jewish history. Gruber's cameralike eye is especially effective in surveying medieval bastions of Jewry like Prague, where she shows ornate synagogues—complete with domes, choir lofts, organs, and other objects that reflected the affluence and worldliness of Czech Jews. Unlike the poorer Jews of rural Poland and Hungary, many of these Prague Jews are shown to have abandoned basic Jewish customs and cultural knowledge. By the 20th century, their eagerness to assimilate with their non-Jewish neighbors had driven the intermarriage rate to unprecedented levels. Perhaps even more surprising is the evidence of a slow resurgence of Jewish identity in select Polish cities like Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Lodz. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, active Jewish study groups have formed, even though ``being a Jew or coming from a Jewish background can still be very uncomfortable for a Pole.'' A rich assemblage of Jewish history, but with the disconcerting organization of a patchwork quilt. (50 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-59568-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A useful and brief, but comprehensive, history of Bosnia from earliest times to the brutal present. Until its virtual dismemberment in the past three years, Bosnia was a unique political and cultural crossroads, a product of four great empires (from Rome through Austro-Hungary) and four major faiths. Some pundits suggest that this last situation is the one that has caused the small country so much grief, but in his tracing of Bosnia's history, Malcolm, a political columnist for the Daily Telegraph, thinks otherwise. He says that the lesson of history is ``not that Bosnia had to be kept in check by a larger power to prevent it from destroying itself from within, but...what had always endangered Bosnia was...the ambitions of larger powers and neighboring states.'' Although the truth of this statement applied to the familiar recent history is transparent, most readers will be less well acquainted with the events that led to Bosnia's current state. The book traces this history, full of upheavals and a swirling mix of ethnic and political tensions, methodically if a bit drily. Throughout, Malcolm makes the point that almost everything that occurs in Bosnian history gets interpreted to suit somebody's nationalist schema; to his credit, he is extremely careful in balancing claims and interpretations for the period leading up to this century. When the more familiar events of the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, and the break-up of Yugoslavia in its aftermath, are reached, he is no less candid in expressing his own point of view, sympathetic to Bosnia, outraged at the manipulations of Milosevic, Karadzic, and the gangsterlike apostles of Greater Serbia and the criminal stupidity with which the EC and the US have handled the situation. A very serviceable introduction to a complicated history.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-8147-5520-8
Page Count: 340
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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