Long Shadows
Truth, Lies and History
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
One of the most urgent issues facing the world today is how countries shape historical memory in the aftermath of calamity, making decisions that cast long shadows into the future. Combining gripping storytelling with sharp observation, Erna Paris takes us on an extraordinary journey through four continents to explore how nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events. She travels through the United States, with its long-buried memory of slavery; to South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission struggles to heal the wounds left by apartheid; to Japan, France, and Germany, where the unresolved pain of Hiroshima and the Holocaust still resonate; and to the former Yugoslavia, where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory. Through its insightful analysis, Long Shadows compels us to question where we stand as individuals in relation to our own collective histories.
Erna Paris is the winner of ten national and international writing awards, three for Long Shadows. She is the author of six critically acclaimed books of literary non-fiction, including The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which won the 1996 Canadian National Jewish Book Award for History. She lives in Toronto.
Winner of the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Award, the inaugural Shaugnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the Dorothy Shoichet prize for history from the Canadian Jewish Book Awards.
'Long Shadows is magnificent. I would love to see this book taught in every history class in America.' - Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking
'Enlightening...Riveting...Paris raises questions of enormous importance.' - Kirkus
'Paris convincingly demonstrates that memory is not only selective but subject to calculated efforts to serve personal needs and national interests.' - The Christian Science Monitor
'Erna Paris gives us a rich, if p
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."
