Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History [Hardcover]

Erna Paris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2, 2001

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 observation, Paris takes the reader on a remarkable journey through four continents to explore how nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events. She seeks out politicians and powerbrokers, as well as men and women living in the aftermath of repression, asking the question: Who gets to decide what actually happened yesterday, then to propagate the tale? How do people live with the consequences? Any why is it that many countries cannot lay the past to rest?

Her journey takes her to the United States, with its memories of slavery; to South Africa, to sit in on a Truth and Reconciliation hearing to heal the divisions of apartheid; to Japan, to probe the unresolved struggled for truth in Second World history; to France, still wrestling with its wartime legacy of collaboration; to Germany, where ferocious 'memory battles' continue to swirl around the Holocaust; and to the former Yugoslavia, where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory, and the way the international community responded to the lethal outcome.

Paris takes us directly to the places of reckoning; she finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with defining events of their lives, and in the changing face of international justice. Long Shadows illuminates the modern world and makes us question where we stand as individuals in relation to our own collective histories.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Library Journal

In this powerful, searing book, Paris (The End of Days) studies the manipulation of history in selected international settings. Her central question is, How do countries reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events? To gather evidence, she traveled through several "stricken lands": Japan, Germany, and France, which are still trying to come to terms with the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust; South Africa and Bosnia; and the United States, which still suffers from the "shadow of slavery." In Europe and South Africa, she examined the workings of courts and commissions and interviewed public officials and prominent citizens. Paris was particularly impressed by "how fiercely people will fight to chronicle their personal and collective experience in the face of an official history that has been falsified." Stories of such people permeate the book. Many of the personal vignettes are unforgettable, especially those dealing with American racism. The emotional intensity and cumulative effect of this book can be overwhelming, so it is best read in small doses. This is an essential purchase for academic libraries and is suitable for large public libraries as well. Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (June 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582341567
• ISBN-13: 978-1582341569
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars probing analysis of how nations cope with past tragedies, July 22, 2001

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memory and Justice, June 12, 2001

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book For Our Times, September 24, 2001

By 

Peter Savage "seriously" (Near Portland, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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.