For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.
A massively detailed account of the good bureaucrats who follow orders and thereby kill millions.
British arts and political activist Gretton has long puzzled over the worse angels of our nature. In this long, dense narrative, the author begins by recounting such things as a communications manager’s protest that she and her colleagues have nothing to do with the evil their corporation has undeniably committed; a flash of conversation with an interviewer of Nazi architect Albert Speer who heard him confess, “I loved machines more than people’; and news of the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist who tried to stop oil conglomerates from devastating his homeland. These all have in common a struggle between violator and victim largely enacted by “desk murderers,” a term that traces loosely to Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its coinage of the more famous phrase “the banality of evil.” The evil these people commit is banal indeed, but the crimes are extraordinary. Over the course of hundreds of pages, Gretton tells stories of Nazi functionaries such as Eichmann himself, presiding over “a bafflingly detailed discussion over exactly how Jewishness is to be defined.” That definition, of course, would condemn millions to death, a process begun by the legal maneuverings of another team of Nazi desk murderers to deprive German and then all subject Jews of their citizenship—and stateless people are susceptible to awful state crimes, as are the anonymous inhabitants of faraway lands. That eventually brings Gretton to the torturers of the George W. Bush administration and, beyond, drone pilots and others who “can stroke their child’s sleeping face in the night, and in the morning send the email that kills people they have never met.” The text, which is one of a planned two volumes, is too long by half and wildly diffuse, with digressions into philosophy, the psychology of storytelling, and the like. However, the subject is tremendously important in a time grown ever darker—and ever more reminiscent of the darkest days in modern world history.
For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-17437-8
Page Count: 1104
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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