An excellent legal-minded elucidation of the long trail toward the conviction of a notorious concentration camp guard. Pair...
Nailing a Nazi-era “faceless facilitator of murder.”
Legal scholar and author Douglas (Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought/Amherst Coll., The Vices, 2011, etc.) conveys the important precedent in the conviction of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk by the Munich court in May 2011, after being acquitted 16 years before by a Jerusalem court for mistaken identity as “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. By that time, the courts had come a long way in recognizing the special nature of the crime of genocide as separate from conventional murder. In this finely wrought work, Douglas traces this crucial legal “self-correction.” After bouncing around several displaced persons camps in Germany following the war, Demjanjuk came to America in 1952, became a union “lifer” mechanic and machinist near Cleveland, Ohio, and an American citizen in 1958. Placed on a U.S. war criminals list in the mid-1970s, he was eventually denaturalized and deported to Israel as Ivan the Terrible for the first sensational trial dominated by many anguished survivors’ accounts. However, mistaking Demjanjuk for another guard underscored the unreliability of memory, and as the pool of survivors diminished over time, the rise of historians’ meticulous research took prominence at the next trial. The German prosecution was able to make several crucial breakthroughs about the defendant, who was taken as a POW in 1942 and pressed into the SS service as a guard at Sobibor and elsewhere. The prosecution argued that there were no grounds to the “question of duress” of SS guards suffering punishment if they refused their killing duties and that since Sobibor, in particular, was a “pure extermination facility,” the job of the guards was by definition as accessory to murder. While some of the legal subtleties might elude lay readers, Douglas ably delineates the legal evolution in atrocity cases.
An excellent legal-minded elucidation of the long trail toward the conviction of a notorious concentration camp guard. Pair with Richard Rashke’s Useful Enemies (2013).Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-12570-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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