- Hardcover: 512 pages
- Publisher: Knopf Canada (Oct 10 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676972519
- ISBN-13: 978-0676972511
- Shipping Weight: 789 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,424,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Erna Paris is a writer "hooked on the ambiguities of history" who finds "nothing more compelling than to hunt down the ways that the past is managed to suit the perception of our present needs." In Long Shadows, Paris explores the often bewildering patterns of national memory: how "the effects of war and its approximations" have been remembered, obscured, or not remembered at all; and the implications for ordinary people whose experiences may or may not have been represented in the official narratives of their nations.
Paris begins with the legacy of the Second World War, examining how memory and neglect inform Germany's reckoning with its "unmasterable" past. In France, she investigates official and private reactions to the crumbling post-war myth of valiant nationwide resistance against the Germans. In Japan, she probes the attitude of denial that has shrouded the truth regarding that nation's war crimes. Paris then turns to the continuing conflict between the black and white races, focusing on the ongoing struggle over the legacy of slavery in the United States, as well as the role and the efficacy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation hearings in the wake of the fall of apartheid. In the book's final sections, she first explores "the way war can be used as a catalyst for national identity," choosing the Jews and the Serbs as examples. Then Paris looks at the role of justice in coming to terms with unreconciled national historical memory through the recent United Nations courts created in response to war crimes committed in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda, and Kosovo.
Long Shadows is a complex and timely work, thoroughly researched and animated by gripping human detail. Paris's sobering journey through "the stricken lands of unresolved past" is a poignant reminder that alongside the relentless falsification of "official" national history lies the fierce struggle of ordinary people to chronicle their personal and collective experience. "Ordinary people will remember," Paris writes, "even when they are ordered not to." --Svenja Soldovieri
From Publishers Weekly
Paris makes an argument that psychologists and anyone who's spent any time on the couch will recognize: countries must confront painful historical episodes in order to resolve them. After completing several books on the aftermath of the Holocaust, including Unhealed Wounds, about the trial of Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyons, the author visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1996, engendering her interest in the worldwide phenomenon of national tragedy, collective memory and its frequent partner in crime, national amnesia. She covers Japan's reckoning with its WWII atrocities, the burgeoning debate over slavery reparations in the U.S., South Africa's post-apartheid reconciliation process and the recent violence in post-Communist Yugoslavia; the Holocaust's legacy comprises the largest section. Paris, a Canadian Jew, offers no easy answers as she examines how "the past is managed to suit the perception of our present needs. The question is, Whose perception and whose needs?" Focusing on the victims and their heirs as well as on the perpetrators and theirs, she explores, among other things, the psychology of shame, guilt, power and disenfranchisement. Paris too often repeats her point that history is "unmasterable," the book's only shortcoming. But after attending trials and interviewing survivors of atrocities around the world, Paris concludes that the painful process of justice is necessary. Otherwise, as in Japan, where the confrontation has been haphazard at best, "Pandora's untamed Furies have been known to wait, forever if necessary, for their next release." Agent, Bruce Westwood. (June)Forecast: This book has recently been awarded a prestigious Canadian prize, the Pearson Writers' Trust for a work "of the highest literary merit." Part of a growing literature on the aftermath of the 20th century's worst tragedies, it should sell well among readers interested in history and memory.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book For Our Times,
By
This review is from: Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History (Hardcover)
Erna Paris has done something very important: gone behind the scenes of the usual historical process, and met with people directly affected by the horrid events in Nazi Germany, Hirohito's Japan, apartheid-era South Africa, Vichy France and the disintegrated Yugoslavia. It's a personal history, but it works perfectly, because she asks the right questions and pursues the truth among the legends and fairy tales we have been told about these homicidal, genocidal regimes.If you're fed up with the usual 'names and dates' types of history, and the 'just so' stories they convey, dig into this book. You're sure to be surprised at every turn. Seriously, you can't go wrong, if you're looking for an insight into how history is rewritten to fool us.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
probing analysis of how nations cope with past tragedies,
By A Customer
This review is from: Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History (Hardcover)
Having just caught the author on C-SPan2, I was motivated to comment on this very important book. Paris, a Canadian, has made a career out of examining, often with great inisght and sensitivity, the impact of tragic historical events on future generations within afflicted generations and she doles out her compassion equally to the children of victims as well as to the children of oppressors who seem to carry a blood-guilt down through the generations. Her specialty has been covering and analyzing the impact of WWII but this book covers that ground and more in the area of Slavery, Apartheid, The Rape of Nanking and more. Her conclusions are much what you'd expect but that's no reason to avoid this book. The strength in her writing is conveying a very personal involvement with her subjects, permitting us as readers to get to "know their pain" (to use an overemployed but apt phrase) and see all the survivors as human in their frailty and in their need to find some way to live with the past. She shows us that there is an entire range of coping mechanisms in dealing with atrocities from total official denial as in Japan to spasms of grief as in Germany. In between are nations just beginning to acknowledge their painful pasts and trying to find their own way of putting those memories to rest while still keeping the message of past lessons. She stresses the need for a system of Justice to bring out the truth or nontruth of events so that groups of people can know and accept the truth. I feel she makes an accurate case that where this no accounting, there is very little healing. I found most fascinating her description of her meeting with a Hiroshima survivor and what that revealed about a specific culture predicting how a nation might choose to react to discussions of the past. This is a fine effort and one worth handing to any Highschool age student who is far too young to have experienced any fallout from the tragedies discussed. In light of all the World War II Revivalism going on and with HBO's upcoming BAND OF BROTHERS dealing with the European theater, this work would make a nice supplemental reading requirement.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memory and Justice,
By Robert (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History (Hardcover)
Erna Paris has produced an excellent summary of the current understanding of the way people in various socieities use memory to come to terms with past traumas. She addresses memories of historical wrongs in Germany, France, Japan, South Africa and the United States. She takes off from the abundant current literature on how societies remember. Her princicpal contribution, however, are the many interviews she conducted in the various countries under consideration. She has an excellent eye for the telling detail and the dramaitc quote. This is one of the most accessbile books on memory and justice I have read.
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