A rare book that ably combines historical edification with a moving narrative.
A historical account of how the French national railway company collaborated with the Nazis and of its contentious journey toward atonement.
During the German occupation of France during World War II, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français, a state-owned railway firm, helped transport around 76,000 Jewish deportees to death camps. In the wake of France’s liberation, however, the beleaguered citizenry seemed to have little appetite for prosecuting its people’s war-related crimes; as author Federman, an assistant professor of negotiation and conflict management at the University of Baltimore, memorably puts it: “France emerged from World War II like most of Europe—too cold, hungry, and perhaps too disoriented to do much justice seeking.” During the occupation, she points out, the SNCF played a series of contradictory roles, variously assuming the mantle of a victim when the French government signed it over to the Germans; a hero of the Resistance, when some of its workers fought back; and a perpetrator of treason when it aided Nazi crimes. Later, when its collaboration became a topic of angry debate, the company retreated into legal technicalities and strenuously avoided acknowledging its moral transgressions or making any restitution. Partly because of protests in the United States, a 2014 settlement of $60 million was finally reached, including a considerable donation to Holocaust education and commemoration. The author furnishes a remarkably thorough account of the issues—historical, legal, and moral—as well as a rigorously lucid exposition of the “discursive landscape” surrounding them. Also, Federman astutely examines the debate as an illustrative microcosm of corporate responsibility at large, calling it “a rare example of what accountability looks like when a company…participates in a variety of transitional justice practices: commemoration, education, apology, and transparency.” The author’s analysis admirably combines scholarly scrupulousness with moral insight as she documents the personal stories of some who survived the Holocaust and others who did not.
A rare book that ably combines historical edification with a moving narrative.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-29-933170-2
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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