A new look at a historical problem both logistical and humanitarian, with obvious implications today.
A historical survey of the plight of post–World War II refugees and their role in the formative years of the Cold War rivalry between East and West.
At the end of World War II, writes Australian historian Fitzpatrick, the four powers occupying the former Third Reich faced an unprecedented problem: feeding, housing, and otherwise caring for millions of displaced persons. Among these were the Jews who survived the Holocaust, as well as 7 million German POWs and “millions of German refugees expelled from Eastern European states who were pouring into Germany.” The Soviets adopted stern measures: a Russian who had been taken prisoner unwillingly was sent to Siberia; a Russian who had willingly gone over to the enemy was executed; someone who was an “inconvenient” between-states individual (e.g., a Polish Jew) was sent packing to the West, “trucked over into the American or British zone for the Allies to deal with”; and so on. The Western powers tended toward clemency, with displaced persons sent to college, given jobs, and often sent as émigrés to nations needing to renew their labor forces, especially Australia and Canada. The two contending systems caused friction, especially the Allied willingness to incorporate former enemies into postwar military forces: in the Soviets’ eyes, this “was sinister, an indication of the Western Allies’ intentions to use the DPs…as the nucleus of military forces that might be used against the Soviet Union in the future.” Contentions over how to treat displaced persons, and especially Jews being allowed to travel to Palestine, fed into larger disagreements between the Soviet bloc and the West, shaping the subsequent Cold War. Differences in how to treat refugees are at the forefront of much international conversation today, Fitzpatrick notes in closing, so that her study becomes an instructive lesson in practical politics as well as history.
A new look at a historical problem both logistical and humanitarian, with obvious implications today.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780691230023
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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