A recondite study, so subtly wrought as to be somewhat murky, traces the deeply divided allegiances and tortuous history of a once proud East Prussia.
A northern Baltic stronghold nestled presently between Gdansk, Poland, and Lithuania’s western border, East Prussia had been home to five centuries of highly evolved German civilization, from the crusading Teutonic Knights who wrested the land from the pagans, to the militarized aristocracy of Junkers from which the German army drew its officers. Bombed by the British in 1944 and overrun by the Red Army, its inhabitants fled westward, and the province was effectively depopulated of Germans and dismantled, becoming today’s haunted, uneasy blend of Russians, Poles and Lithuanians. Novelist and biographer Egremont (Siegfried Sassoon, 2005, etc.) tiptoes through this “whispering past” by seeking out some of the members of the old landowning families to get a sense of a previous vanished world: the Dönhoffs of Friedrichstein, the Lehndorffs of Steinort and the Dohnas of Schlobitten. For example, in 1992, the author interviewed politician and writer Marion Dönhoff, one of the founders of Die Zeit, whose memoirs serve as a key historical source. With a keen eye to uncovering history, Egremont studies a 1911 report made of the region by an English colonel, Alfred Knox, at the height of East Prussia’s efficient, militarized glory, when the port of Königsberg was thriving, the railroads criss-crossed the region and a sense of powerful new German nationalism prevailed, albeit tinged with an anxiousness about the threat of Russia. The German euphoria after the victory of Tannenberg in 1914 soon gave way to a shattering defeat and a collapse of many great houses. Treks by poet Agnes Miegel and novelist Thomas Mann also provided navigation through this place full of “old yearning.” The once stately Königsberg, home to Immanuel Kant, has become today’s scarred and “doomed” modern Russian metropolis of Kaliningrad, “a place of victims.” Ponderous, thickly detailed, somberly composed work joining travelogue and reflective history lesson.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-15808-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
PROFILES
A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11378-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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