A vivid recounting of a shameful event that still resonates.
A World War II tale about how panic, fear, and xenophobia led to a drastic governmental policy in the U.K.
Drawing on copious unpublished and archival material, British journalist Parkin has produced a richly detailed history of the internment of thousands of men and women because of their German or Austrian ancestry. Many had fled to England as refugees from Nazi Germany, and the vast majority were Jewish. Though they had become productive, upstanding members of their communities, “jingoism and hatred,” stoked by the media, became justification for the new policy. “Instead of taking an enlightened lead,” writes the author, “the government now used public opinion as justification for strict measures.” Parkin focuses on Hutchinson, on the Isle of Man, which housed some 2,000 men from the time it opened in July 1940 and whose inmates included artists, musicians, fashion designers, architects, academics, and writers. “It was as if a tsunami had deposited a crowd of Europe’s prominent men onto this obscure patch of grass in the middle of the Irish Sea,” writes the author. Officials ran the camp as humanely as possible, and the inmates worked to make it a community. They gave theater and music performances, set up cafes, started a newspaper, and conducted classes, especially for the younger men whose schooling had been disrupted. Among those younger men was Peter Fleischmann, whose story exemplifies the inconsistencies—indeed, the absurdity—of the policy of internment. An orphan who had come to the U.K. on the Kindertransport, he was at first seen as no threat to national security. Nevertheless, he was later arrested, and six weeks after the camp opened, he arrived at Hutchinson. His experiences there changed the course of his future. Parkin also chronicles the policy shift that eventually freed about half of the internees by the spring of 1941. “Historical ignorance and bedrock xenophobia” led to a “panic measure” that, Parkin warns, reverberates in contemporary treatment of asylum seekers.
A vivid recounting of a shameful event that still resonates.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982178-52-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
This is the edition that serious students of the Civil War, and Grant’s role in it, will want. Indispensable.
A new edition, with thorough commentary, of the memoirs of an American Caesar—and indeed, a book long reckoned to be America’s version of The Gallic Wars.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1855) began his military career without much promise but distinguished himself in combat in the Mexican-American War, where, as he recounts, he came into contact with many of his future opponents in the Civil War. His legendary service in the Western theater of operations, and later as commander of the entire Union Army, led to his election and re-election as president, but all that did not save him from being bilked by a business partner—and thus this memoir, which none other than Mark Twain convinced him to publish to provide for his soon-to-be-widow, since Grant was already ill with cancer. As editor Samet (English/West Point; No Man's Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post–9/11 America, 2014, etc.) notes, rumors immediately emerged that Twain had ghostwritten it. In fact, Grant labored endlessly on this massive book, which, writes Samet, “is the artifact that does justice to his achievement as the leader of an army that preserved a nation and emancipated four million people.” Grant’s writing is simple and unadorned, though those who read between the lines will see that he is nothing if not politically astute. His account of the political troubles of William Tecumseh Sherman for offering the same mercies as he had to the vanquished Confederate forces is a model of understatement—though, he adds, “the feeling against Sherman died out very rapidly, and it was not many weeks before he was restored to the fullest confidence of the American people.” If anything, Samet might be criticized, gently, for being too vigorous in annotation; an early disquisition on the French and Indian War, for instance, is orders of magnitude longer than the aside of Grant’s that prompted it, and it begs to be reined in. Nonetheless, for Civil War buffs, this is a must-read.
This is the edition that serious students of the Civil War, and Grant’s role in it, will want. Indispensable.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-244-0
Page Count: 1024
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.
Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn, 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, “reluctantly and sadly” to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, “because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do.” He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war’s heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where “primitive” societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1992-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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