Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History

by Erna Paris

Book Overview

Long Shadows offers a personal examination into the shifting terrain of war and memory that seeks to understand how nations come to terms with their most painful history. Combining storytelling with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582341567
• ISBN13: 9781582341569
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 495 Pages
• Weight: 2.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Confronting the Wrenching , and Doing It Very Well Indeed

Ms. Paris writes with the immediacy of a novelist and the analytical qualities of a philosopher. She is clearly enormously intelligent, well-read, introspective, synthetic in the best sense, and probing. I would not call her analysis of the experiences of memory and history optimistic; on many levels, it is starkly cynical. I would call it fascinating and deep, not only from the many interviews she did but from the background research that informs them. Her treatments of Germany, Japan, South Africa, the United States, the Balkans, and the issues of UN tribunals and international criminal jurisprudence are balanced, percipient, and compelling. She is a voice for dogged determination in the process of incrementally improving our species and its approach to conflict, against the culture of silence and looking the other way, against atrocity with impunity. Read her. Find motivation in her stories. Then act as best you can to further a better and different world. Humanity is, and always will be, a work in progress. Ms. Paris contributes mightily to an appreciation of the costs, tradeoffs, and nuances that entails.

A Book For Our Times

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.

probing analysis of how nations cope with past tragedies

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.

Memory and Justice

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.