An unsparing look at a little-known episode of WW II that, according to the author, reveals the moral ambiguities that arise in situations of extreme violence. On D-Day in 1944, the combined partisan forces of a small town in central France took matters into their own hands and attempted to liberate the town from the Nazis and their collaborators, the French militia. That decision, according to the Bulgarian-born literary and social critic Todorov (Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, 1996, etc.), set in motion the ``aesthetically perfect form'' of a tragedy. The partisans, once they realized that the arrival of the Allies was not imminent and local support unlikely, decided to retreat from the town. They took hostages from among the Vichy collaborators, including the wife of an important official. French militiamen in turn seized 70 Jewish adults and children and threatened to massacre them unless the Vichy hostages were returned. Todorov frames and narrates these events as tragedy because ``once in motion, everything seemed to be interconnected with an implacable rigor and because the causes of calamity were not contingent and could not be pushed aside—evil ensued from goodness itself; it seemed unavoidable.'' Readers may or may not be convinced by Todorov's argument that the protagonists were caught in a web of inexorable necessity; more disturbing is his assertion that the resistance fighters had some blame for the ensuing massacre. He seems to believe that the fascist militiamen were, in part, victims, too, despite the fact that the partisans were fighting for different ideals than their fascist enemies. In a way, the story of the town of Saint-Amand, symbolically located at the geographic center of France, is emblematic rather than exceptional; the tragedy unfolding here was being played out across France and Europe. Unsettling moral and ethical problems—captured in this provocative record of one small, bloody episode—that demand to be confronted.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-87451-747-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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