A unique WWII history and absorbing story of two bold, unconventional women.
The story of two women artists who courageously resisted Nazi occupation of a small island.
Historian Jackson offers a fresh look at World War II resistance through the lives of Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, lovers who lived on Jersey, part of the Channel Islands, throughout the Nazi occupation. The daughters of wealthy families in Nantes, the two had fallen in love when they were teenagers, thrived among the avant-garde in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, and moved to Jersey in 1937 to escape rising oppression and anti-Semitism—Lucy had Jewish heritage—in the French capital. As artists, Lucy took the moniker Claude Cahun and Suzanne, Marcel Moore, with which they signed their creative work: photographs, collages, drawings. “By choosing new identities but also keeping their given names, Lucy and Suzanne remained somewhere between masculine and feminine,” Jackson observes, “resisting either category fully and enjoying the freedom to float between the two when it suited them.” In Jersey, the women were determined to demoralize the occupiers, leaving notes, cartoons, and illustrations throughout the island where soldiers could find them. “Each message,” writes the author, “tried to convince soldiers to lay down weapons, desert, and go home.” With increasing German paranoia about spies and subterfuge, avoiding suspicion was difficult; but it was not until late in the war that the women were arrested, interrogated, tried, and sentenced to death—a sentence successfully appealed. They were released after Germany’s surrender. For Lucy, who suffered many physical and mental debilities, the war “was the one moment in her life when she seemed to have the strongest sense of purpose and the most direct vision about who she wanted to be.” Drawing on archival and genealogical sources, the women’s own writings, and histories of the period, Jackson creates a vivid picture of the tense, fearsome atmosphere of Jersey under Nazi occupation and the perils of resistance.
A unique WWII history and absorbing story of two bold, unconventional women.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-916-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome new version of a publication that is no less important now than it was in 1967.
A timely distilled version of the powerful report on racism in the U.S.
Created by Lyndon Johnson’s executive order in 1967, the Kerner Commission was convened in response to inner-city riots in cities like Newark and Detroit, and its findings have renewed relevance in the wake of the George Floyd verdict and other recent police brutality cases. The report, named for Otto Kerner, the chairman of the commission and then governor of Illinois, explored the systemic reasons why an “apocalyptic fury” broke out that summer even in the wake of the passage of significant civil rights and voting acts—a response with striking echoes in recent events across the country. In this edited and contextualized version, New Yorker staff writer Cobb, with the assistance of Guariglia, capably demonstrates the continued relevance and prescience of the commission’s findings on institutionalized discriminatory policies in housing, education, employment, and the media. The commission was not the first to address racial violence in the century, and it would not be the last, but the bipartisan group of 11 members—including two Blacks and one woman—was impressively thorough in its investigation of the complex overarching social and economic issues at play. “The members were not seeking to understand a singular incident of disorder,” writes Cobb, “but the phenomenon of rioting itself.” Johnson wanted to know what happened, why it happened, and what could be done so it doesn’t happen “again and again.” Of course, it has happened again and again, and many of the report’s recommendations remain unimplemented. This version of the landmark report features a superb introduction by Cobb and a closing section of frequently asked questions—e.g., “How come nothing has been done about these problems?” The book contains plenty of fodder for crucial national conversations and many excellent ideas for much-needed reforms that could be put into place now.
A welcome new version of a publication that is no less important now than it was in 1967.Pub Date: July 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-892-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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