Despite the author's enthusiasm - or maybe actually because of it - this history book is a complete disaster from beginning to end. Arnold Reisman has clearly let his passion for the man at the center of this fascinating and little-known topic of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust get the better of him. The result is a long and confusing narrative full of repetitions, approximations and factual errors, which does not offer a clear and comprehensible chronicle of the real and captivating story of Behiç Erkin, the Turkish diplomat who with his staff saved Turkish Jews living in France from certain deportation and death during the Nazi occupation.
Quite apart from the many dates and names spelt incorrectly, repetitions, documents sourced twice, absence of proper formatting (facsimile documents sometimes too big and sometimes too small) commas missing in sentences, obvious spelling mistakes ("too" instead of "to") etc., and other typos which show a clear lack of review and preparation in the publication of the work, there are a myriad of appaling factual mistakes, such as when Turkey is described as a "landlocked" country, the Anschluss is described as having taken place in 1934 or Sarajevo is quoted as being "in the very heart of Macedonia". These blatant and easily verifiable errors are simply unexcusable from any student of history. The book even produces its own contradictions, as when two different men are identified two pages away as vice-consuls in Paris during the war.
The lack of rigor in the details in turn reinforces and feeds on the important shortcomings which this books suffers from in its very construction, namely the entirely haphazard narrative structure. The repetitions within chapters and paragraphs mirror those in the story itself, leaving the reader confused and tired. Mr. Reisman procedes by accumulation, offering little explanation - and even less analysis - for events, actions and declarations, and instead repeating himself endlessly with an overflow of documents, not all of them properly explained or even described. Context is missing at every page, and major pieces of informations are never explained, only to be briefly mentioned late in the book. A few examples: it is only through footnotes coming well after these people have been inserted in the narrative that we learn the basics about who Atatürk was, what Philippe Pétain did, where Charles de Gaulle came from and what he stood for or what Drancy was... Some events are not explained at all! And when they are, Wikipedia is openly used a source - in itself no crime - except that it is sometimes quoted literally and is almost never accompanied by any personal analysis!
This sloppy attempt at a work of history, full of repetitions and grand statements, is not worthy of any reader's time, despite the all-too apparent earnestness of its author and the effort he has put into putting together this book, which does offer a wide rang of interesting first-hand sources.
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