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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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