A memorable book that will excite discussion in anthropological and geopolitical circles.
Somber travels across the Indonesian archipelago—often a step ahead of the machete.
Readers who take their view of Indonesia from The Year of Living Dangerously aren’t far from the mark, if Parry’s account is to be trusted—and, as a correspondent for the Times of London, he has sterling credentials. Parry’s report begins in Borneo, long synonymous in the Western mind with all things savage. There seems a reason for all that: The Dayak of Borneo, the ethnic and political majority, harbor a particular hatred for a Muslim people among them called the Madurese, who are tough enough for Parry to liken them to Sicilians. As he travels through the island, Parry meets incident after incident of savagery, as in West Kalimantan, where the Dayaks had not only slaughtered the Madurese, but had also “ritually decapitated them, carried off their heads as trophies and eaten their hearts and livers.” Cannibalism in this day and age? You bet, Parry replies in a passage sure to provoke bad feelings among culturally relative types, pausing to acknowledge that the Dayaks’ ethnic-cleansing arguments are just modern enough to employ “the kind of consensus that has built up at various times about Romany Gypsies, or about Jews.” At another turning point, Parry is on hand for the “sack of Jakarta,” in which hundreds died in antigovernment demonstrations that led, in time, to the fall of Suharto—and the rise of a particularly militant kind of nationalist Islamism. The apex of the book involves Parry’s nadir, when, after one too many brushes with death on East Timor, where bike-gangish Indonesian paramilitary forces energetically butchered separatists and anyone else they came across, he fled, “because I was afraid of being killed or, more precisely, of dying in fear.” In such horrifying places, surely that’s about the only way there is to die.
A memorable book that will excite discussion in anthropological and geopolitical circles.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1808-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A trim, at times hypnotic, history of polar exploration. Almost like a documentary filmmaker, Holland (former archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England) has cut and spliced ships' logs, sailors' journals, and other primary sources, adding his own narrative bridges, to present a history of Western encounters with the Arctic. Spurred by mercantilism and nationalism during the age of discovery, European nations sought new lands to colonize and a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the trading centers of Asia. Few who made it into the high latitudes remained untouched by the austere magic of the region. The mid-16th-century Dutch officer Gerrit De Veer wrote: ``Wee saw the first Ice, which we wondered at, at the first, thinking that it had beene white Swannes.'' Later European expeditions to the Arctic had scientific, as well as commercial, missions. And after the North American Arctic had been gradually mapped in the 19th century (mostly by ships sent to search for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition), the North Pole itself became a destination. Over 400 miles away from the nearest point of land along the northern shore of Greenland, the Pole is a spot on the frozen Arctic Ocean devoid of life and without any commercial or geopolitical value. But people wanted to reach it. In 1897, Solomon August AndrÇe made an attempt via unpowered silk hydrogen balloon. He didn't make it, joining a long list of people who had died or were yet to perish in pursuit of a passage or the pole before Robert Peary announced his success in September 1909. Frederick Cook's claim to have reached the pole before Peary has been discredited, though the argument still simmers in polar circles. Thanks are due to Holland for his own smart commentary and for delivering the best of 400 years' worth of source material. These days, if you have enough money, you can have a BBQ at the pole and a sauna back aboard the icebreaker. Heroic polar firsts are a thing of the past, but going over these attempts still makes for an absorbing evening. (Illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0128-5
Page Count: 314
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
With a highly sensitive but unsparing eye, these essays argue that new moral and linguistic categories are required in order to respond properly and honestly to the reality of the Holocaust. Langer (English/Simmons College), who won a National Book Critics Circle award for Holocaust Testimonies ( 1991), asserts that ``language preserves a semblance of order that disintegrates'' in the reality of the mass slaughter of Jews. Analyzing the ways in which people have tried to understand or represent the Holocaust, he looks at oral testimony, diaries, memoirs, and fiction, including works by writers like William Styron and Bernard Malamud for whom the Holocaust is an important but not necessarily central theme. Langer also examines some portrayals of the Holocaust on American TV, stage, and screen, eloquently resisting attempts to sentimentalize Holocaust victims, resisters, or survivors. Above all, he insists that the Holocaust represents a ``rupture'' in the images and values of modern Western culture, several times approvingly quoting Jean AmÇry's observation that ``no bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice.'' Langer's only questionable contention is that ``Auschwitz introduced the realm of the unthinkable into the human drama.'' What, one wonders, of the mass deaths of millions during WW I's trench warfare or Stalin's murder of as many as 30 million in the USSR during the purges? Generally, however, Langer writes superbly. He has a gift for simple yet resonant phrasing: Of fictional survivors such as Aharon Appelfeld's Great Barfuss and Cynthia Ozick's Rosa, he writes that they are emotionally and spiritually ``dead while alive'' and thus ``amputated from time.'' Langer applies his insightful, razor-sharp pen to others' works about an event that, he convincingly maintains, carries neither lesson nor moral but instead overpowers memory, mocks the pretensions of civilization, and leaves an absurd, irredeemable legacy.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-509357-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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