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
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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