Provocative—and timely in these France-bashing days, certain to prompt learned commentary.
A searching inquiry into the behavior of ordinary French people under Vichy and Nazi rule—behavior that defies the easy categories of “collaborator” and “resister.”
The French, writes Gildea (History/Oxford Univ.), “have never faced up to their wartime past in any sustained and systematic way,” and so such categories remain current, even if they have little explanatory power. Overall, he writes, the German occupation was far from brutal for most ordinary French, who made do and, in the main, devoted themselves to the ordinary concerns of putting food on the table rather than directly resisting, or directly aiding, the Nazi overlords. French society became atomized as a consequence; in particular, rural communities deliberately isolated themselves the more authoritarian the Vichy government became, turning to the black market and resisting mostly in economic matters—by, for instance, evading taxes and keeping “resources out of the hands of the Germans unless the Germans were prepared to offer black-market prices.” For most French, Vichy was not quite as authoritarian as it was later made out to be: Gildea argues that it was incoherent, unable to control either the economy or society, and riddled with corruption and special interests. And the formally organized, Communist-dominated resistance was similarly ineffectual; Gildea writes that the Allied bombings of French and German cities were far more effective in weakening the German machine than were the occasional assassinations and acts of sabotage of resistance cells. Most ordinary French people, especially in the countryside, gave the organized resistance little direct support, at least in part because they mistrusted the Communists. Most, too, Gildea suggests, did not blink when their Jewish neighbors were deported—but mainly because the story that the Jews were merely being drafted as laborers was widely accepted, and not because of any particular widespread hatred for them.
Provocative—and timely in these France-bashing days, certain to prompt learned commentary.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6630-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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