by Jeremy R. Mack ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A well-researched and powerful indictment of France’s complicity in the Holocaust.
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A re-examination of French collaboration with Nazi occupiers during World War II.
The German occupation of France, between 1940 and 1944, was an unmitigated catastrophe for its Jewish residents. Their wealth was stolen; they were summarily arrested, expelled from their homes, and shuttled to concentration camps to labor and die. Debut author Mack argues that this was only possible because of the active participation of the collaborationist French government, a dark fact not only largely redacted from official French history, but dishonestly replaced with heroic tales of resistance. The author conscientiously traces the historical arc of anti-Semitism in France and discusses the ways Jews became a convenient scapegoat for economic malaise and an explosive immigration crisis. In the first of three sections, Mack takes the reader on an architectural tour of Paris, highlighting the buildings the Nazis took over for their administrative purposes as well as the ways a divided France became complicit in its own abuse. In the second section, the gruesome extermination of the Jews is considered, the culmination of a campaign that began with the deprivation of their civil rights and equality. When the dust settled, more than 73,000 Jewish residents of France were murdered. In the last section, Mack confronts the collective silence on the part of the French regarding the nation’s acquiescence to German aggression, a self-censorship that has prevented an honest grappling with its shame and guilt. This is the fulcrum of the study—a philosophical examination of the reasons for France’s muteness regarding its active partnership with German occupiers in crimes against humanity. Mack, a psychoanalyst, unpacks the elements of French culture and history that would have made these transgressions possible. The author dissects, with journalistic meticulousness and polemical verve, the motivations of Vichy statesmen like Philippe Pétain, who saw the nation’s invasion as an opportunity for a kind of conservative revolution. Mack’s writing, consistently lucid and even elegant, is commensurate with the gravity of the subject matter. His command of the historical period in Paris is exceptional, though he tends to bury the reader under mounds of minute detail. Also, his judgments can be rhetorically strident—surely it’s an exaggeration that “the tendency of the French to resist consisted mainly in listening to the broadcasts of ‘Les français parlent aux français’ on Radio London.” In fact, he provides plenty of counterfactual evidence on this score. And while the author’s chief historical premise isn’t original—he cites the influence of Robert Paxton’s groundbreaking Vichy France 1940-1944—his consideration of the proper distribution of blame is an important reflection on the moral dimension of the 20th century’s central disaster. He follows a tradition inaugurated by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, also a psychoanalyst, of plumbing the murky depths of moral responsibility with sensitivity and insightfulness. Mack’s study is an intrepid one, challenging pieties historically repudiated but still alive in the public imagination. Included are pages and pages of beautifully illustrative photographs.
A well-researched and powerful indictment of France’s complicity in the Holocaust.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Tandem Lane Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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