A work of significant moral clarity and elegant precision.
The Katyń Massacre was the opening salvo to a war defined by unimaginable horrors. Here, its story is told clearly and passionately with allegiance only to the truth.
In the study of history, one of the hallmarks of the “great powers” is that the rules do not apply to them. Powerful empires—Roman, Ottoman, Soviet, etc.—create their own realities that may or may not coincide with one’s lived experience. After Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, the Soviets decided it was in their best interest to annex a piece of the eastern half of that country. Consequently, it created a reality in which the extant Polish government was dissolved. According to their Orwellian logic, if there was no legitimate government to reckon with, they had free reign. Among their first acts was the capture of more than 22,000 Poles. These men would later be described as the elite of Polish society, including military officers but also aristocrats, artists, and indeed a “complete cross section” of Polish life. Elite or no, the prisoners were bombarded with torrents of authoritarian disinformation and propaganda. During April and May 1940, they were executed. When the Nazis discovered the bodies of those who had been trucked away and “liquidated,” they saw it as a propaganda coup. Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, offhandedly called the massacre a “mistake” and tried to pin the blame on the Germans. In a riveting narrative, Rogoyska brings the victims out of the shadows, telling their stories as well as those of the people desperately searching for them. Throughout, the author’s humanity is on full display. These are not just statistics or another item in the ledger of World War II atrocities, but flesh-and-blood individuals who were cut down for no reason and whose memory was lost in the fog of military, great-power history. Rogoyska is to be commended for resurrecting this heartbreaking tale.
A work of significant moral clarity and elegant precision.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78607-892-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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