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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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