Ireland Books

A great source of information and wonderfully presented!

Loved the thorough treatment Mr. Lavin gives the Celts in "The Celtic World." If anyone enjoyed Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization," they will enjoy this volume as well.

Patrick Lavin's 'The Celtic World' is a must reading for all aficionados of Celtic heritage. His obvious lengthly research of this ancient and famous culture comes to life through his entertaining literary writing style and his intense interest in his subject matter. Drawing mainly on classical sources, and occasionally on archaeology and Celtic traditions, Lavin outlines a history of Celtic people from their emergence as a distinct culture to their literary renaissance in nineteenth century Ireland.

This is a great, easy to read book with a depth of information on Irish history. I would recommend it to anyone traveling to Ireland as a handbook which will enrich their experience.

You need not be from Iowa, be a farmer, railroad person, or have grown up during the depression to be truly entertained by this book. A story of a ordinary family that tells the truth, that no family is truly ordinary. We all share joy, grief, hardship, and love and live extrodinary aspects of our ordinary lives. Patrick tells his family's story with a manner true to his family's style. Plain but elegent, reserved but openly humerous, and with a depth that is easily felt but not described. I enjoyed it very much and hope you will as well.

Thanks

Once Americans were connected by kin and neighborliness into communities linked by the railroad. Patrick Irelan's parents set up housekeeping in this America during the depths of the Great Depression, farming one depleted acreage after another. His father was a whiz telegrapher and soon both parents were working as station agents for the Burlington Railroad, happiest, his mother recalled, while living in a Nebraska depot.

Irelan captures the ritual and spectacle of railroading. In Allerton, Iowa, we wait for the train: preparation, anticipation, arrival--in seconds only the tracks and town remain. In Chicago, however, the train waits for us.

Central Standard is the story (twenty five, in fact) of a family typical, yet so unique as to be unknowable without a guide. Fortunately, the family has provided one.

Inspired by the intricate and diligent work of a railroad man and farmer, Pete Irelan and his family, Central Standard tops the list of the best. The harshest era of our Midwest is set with joy, sadness, and the hard work of a determined and loving family. Throughout the book, Irelan emerges the reader into a world of good humor, grieving, and hope. And in the end, we reenter the 21st century with a sense of nostalgia and an understanding of what the meaning of "family" truly is. There are no gross horrors in this book, nor stories of dysfunctional people in order to keep the reader's interest. With Irelan's sense of story telling and his poetic way with words, telling a story is all we need to relive his time and place.

This is a book about growing up in depression-era and post-depression small town Iowa - stories about working for the
railroad, trying to eke out a living by farming, and the reality
of hard work and family life. Irelan evokes a time when family was important and makes everyday characters come to life in this
collection of essays about his parents and relatives as he grows up in southern Iowa.

Tom Quinn Kumpf has written a beautiful book. The photography is outstanding and the narrative reveals an unusual insight into the plight of the children, victims of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Kumpf does not point fingers or take sides. He tells it as he saw it in Belfast.

Like no other before him, Tom Quinn Kumpf has managed to capture, through word and image, the reality of today's Belfast streets as seen by and through the youth that live there.

Kumpf has walked ever inch of Belfast's peace line documenting the lives and stories of this troubled city's youth - youth from both sides of the divide.

Most importantly, and what sets this book apart from others like it, is Kumpf's manner of reporting their stories. Evident in his work, Kumpf has managed to gain trust in a place that doesn't easily trust. He has uncovered and exposed the human side of a terribly twisted political and religious war.

His work is genuine and truthful, and in it you will see both the pain and the hope that lies within the children of Belfast.

I met Tom this past weekend in Dublin, OH and talked to him for quite a while. Being a photographer, I was interested in hearing his thoughts on process and technique and other techie stuff. While talking to him I looked through his book and realized that this was much more than technical work. When I got home and started reading it I realized the importance of his work. I highly recommend this book not just for the photos but for the stories that go with them. Excellent work.

I picked it up , just by excident . Than , after being shocked by exellency of photography , I loked at the name of the author ... Tom Kumpf ...
I was shoked , surprised , and heart by his work ! As published author , kind of famouse photographer ... all I can say to Mr. Kumpf : WOW ! ... Highly recomended !!!

Now here's an iUniverse book well worth their otherwise high price for a paperback. I found it hard to put down for long. The battle which the title's event commemorates is dealt with clearly enough to understand why it went the way it did. But who could have guessed the French troops would decide to have a coffee and pastry break beforehand? I never realized just how inept the French commanders really were in Mexico, though Mexican president Juarez and his loyalists would have been tenacious combatants for any such unscrupulous invader. I knew the installed "Emperor" Maximilian was out of his element, but not that he was so truly foolish--or that his more realistic wife had a nervous breakdown. Austin, Texas author Miles has a great eye for colorful detail, and a lot of it is fascinating, such as that a former colonel of a volunteer New York regiment in the American Civil War almost was executed with Maximilian, until the colonel's resourceful wife talked Juarez into sparing him. It beats the dry histories, while being a respectable, well-footnoted history in itself, and with a nice bibliography for further exploration. Except for a few typos, a misleading blurb on the back cover, and some needless repetition, this is a great read.

Award-winning radio journalist Donald W. Miles presents Cinco de Mayo: What Is Everybody Celebrating?, a historical account of the events that sparked the annual Cinco de Mayo holiday in Mexico. Nearly 150 years ago, when the emperor of France ordered his generals to take over Mexico and use it as a "base" to help the Confederates in the American Civil War against the Union Army, Mexico fought back. On May 5th, 1862, Mexico won a decisive battle against French forces, preserving its independence and preventing foreign interference in the American Civil War, yet it would take Mexico another five years to expel the last of the French soldiers from its borders. Cinco de Mayo chronicles the war between Mexico and France in plain terms, accessible to readers of all backgrounds; notes and an index round out this excellent historical primer especially recommended for public library collections.

Reviewed by Leslie Granier for Reader Views (4/07)

I must admit I had no clue what the celebrations for Cinco de Mayo (May 5) were all about before I read this book. Miles provided an insightful and intuitive book that concentrated mainly on the French and Mexican forces. He also effectively included the ways in which the Civil War that was simultaneously occurring in the United States affected the events of the war in Mexico. It truly made me wonder how history might have turned out differently if the United States had been able to intervene more on Mexico's behalf.

Interestingly, the accounts of this war from France's point of view are similar to what many believe is occurring today in Iraq. As stated on page 81, "the government was concealing the real purposes for going to war, the invading army was led to believe they would be welcomed as liberators" and "there was no plan to deal with the responsibilities after a military victory." He also effectively showed how the U. S. Civil War influenced the war in Mexico."

I appreciated the inclusion of an epilogue that told what happened to many of the major players after the war ended. I enjoy finding out about people's fate after their roles in historical events are lessened with time. For me it provides an end to what would otherwise seem to be an unfinished story.

I think it would be interesting to see this same chain of events written from the French army's point of view for comparison. For me it provided an understanding that there were health issues and food issues involved but I would think the army of a world power would have been more prepared and more successful, especially since other nations did not offer help to the Mexican armed forces.

"Cinco de Mayo" is a comprehensive account of the war between Mexico and France and the role played by the United States. Through the use of vivid descriptions at times I felt I could picture the scenes and see the carnage. This book is an excellent portrayal of the events of May 5, offering immense insight into what happened both before and during the fighting. While not the turning point of the war, the Battle of Puebla inspired the Mexican forces to persevere and accomplish their mission."

... very readable ... story on the French intervention in Mexico ... great usefulness to readers who want to want to know how ... Cinco de Mayo fits into the ... struggle to keep Mexico from becoming a European colony. [Don Miles] brings out many human and colorful aspects ... often lost in traditionally technical histories. His intimate knowledge of the Mexican culture is reflected in all that he writes.
--Dr. Robert Pierce, Professor Emeritus, Journalism & Communications, University of Florida

This remarkably accessible, lucid survey of recent Russian history is a must-read for anyone interested in global affairs. Yegor Gaidar, an acting prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, provides a concise yet comprehensive summary of the course of empires during the 20th century, and draws some pointed lessons. His goal is to counter current nostalgia for the glory days of the Soviet Union. getAbstract admires how effectively he executes his objective, with a step-by-step recapitulation of the economic blunders that led inevitably to the Soviet Union's dissolution. However, he also shows why those who expected democracy to grow must face the fact that it is on the retreat - and he leaves no doubt about the dangerous crossroads at which Russia stands.

Cassandra was the Trojan woman whom Apollo gave the gift of prophesy-and the curse of never being believed. Yegor Gaidar sees that Russia's future depends crucially on coming to grips with its past, but present events make it clear that his prophesies, like Cassandra's, fall on deaf ears.

In his new book, Collapse of an Empire, Gaidar has a pressing purpose: to alert Russians-and the world-to the dangers denying the real reasons behind the collapse of the USSR. Gaidar has a strong historical sense (which is often absent among economists, alas), and from his understanding of history (most notably, of Weimar Germany and post-Hapsburg Austria-Hungary), he knows that imperial collapse can be disorienting and dispiriting to the empire's subjects, even if the empire brutally repressed them. He also knows that demagogues and revanchists can exploit this disorientation and depression to achieve power. Those suffering from post-empire depression are very susceptible to demagogic myths that imperial glory was destroyed by "stabs in the back" from enemies foreign and domestic, and that restoration of this glory requires the people to unite behind an authoritarian leader who will ruthlessly pursue traitors at home and take revenge on foreign foes.

But he foresees that this is ultimately the road to disaster:

The legend of a flourishing and mighty country destroyed by foreign enemies is a myth dangerous to the country's future. . . . This is the picture that dominates Russian public opinion: (1) twenty years ago there existed a stable, developing and powerful country, the Soviet Union; (2) strange people (perhaps agents of foreign intelligence services) started political and economic reforms within it; (3) the results of these reforms were catastrophic; (4) in 1999-2000 people came to power who were concerned with the country's state interests; (5) life became better after that. This myth is as far from the truth as the one of an unconquerable and loyal Germany that was popular among the Germany that was popular among the Germans in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The goal of this book is to show that picture does not correspond to reality. Believing that myth is dangerous for the country and the world.

As an aside, I can speak to the ubiquity and power of this myth. I have had a couple of Russian students in the United States. Both were intelligent and worldly. One had lived in the United States for 10 years. Both were going to business schools. And each believed that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were American agents, and that the collapse of the USSR was a CIA plot. The first time I heard this I was surprised, but thought it was an aberration. The second time I heard it I was stunned.

But back to Collapse of an Empire. Gaidar's basic thesis is that the economic-and hence political-collapse of the USSR was inevitable:

[The collapse of the USSR] was preordained by the fundamental characteristics of the Soviet economy and political system: the institutions formed in the late 1920s and early 1930s were too rigid and did not permit the country to adapt to the challenges of world development in the late 20th century. The legacy of socialist industrialization, the anomalous defense load, the extreme crisis in agriculture, and the noncompetitive manufacturing sector made the fall of the regime inevitable. In the 1970s and early 1980s these problems could have been managed if oil prices had been high. But that was not a dependable foundation for preserving the last empire.

Gaidar recounts the chronology of collapse in excruciating detail; too much detail at times for my taste, but a choice that Gaidar defends as necessary to overcome the power of the myth.

Gaidar shows that agriculture was the Achilles heel of the Soviet system. Stalin ruthlessly exploited agriculture to fund industrial development. This worked for awhile, but only served to demonstrate that supply curves are much more elastic in the long run than the short run. In the short run, peasants could be forced to turn over the bulk of their harvest in exchange for a pittance. In the long run, however, the attempt to extract surplus from the countryside and the necessity of attracting labor to manufacturing and megaprojects led to a flow of the best and most productive labor out of agriculture and into industry. Soviet agriculture became progressively less efficient as a result. Combine this with assorted insanities, like the virgin lands program, and what was once the world's breadbasket became a farming basketcase.

Forced to import larger and larger quantities of food, but non-competitive in the production of machinery or other manufactured goods, the USSR relied on the export of oil to pay for it. With increasing oil output from rich western Siberian fields, and spiraling prices (courtesy of OPEC and declining US production), for a time the USSR was able to overcome the creeping weakness of its agriculture sector, and even go on an aggressive military and political offensive that spanned the globe. But soon declining oil production (attributable to extremely inefficient Soviet practices) and plummeting prices (courtesy of growing non-OPEC output, burgeoning Saudi production, and more efficient consumption of energy in the West) conspired to create an acute fiscal crisis in the USSR.

Gaidar chronicles the results of this crisis, and the government's (and Party's) incompetence in dealing with it. The rigidity of a centrally planned system, the rudimentary nature of the financial system, the acute political constraints facing the country's leadership, and the geronocratic nature of that leadership, made it impossible to respond. Things spiraled out of control. Price controls prevented smooth adjustment to external shocks. Fear of political unrest prevented the leadership from lifting the controls. Faced with incredible strains on the budget, the government ran the printing press overtime. Partial "reform" measures, and improvident policy choices (such as the anti-alcohol campaign that deprived the government of a large share of its domestic revenues), only made things worse. In the end, everything came tumbling down.

Gaidar's narrative is compelling. To a Chicago-trained economist, it is almost axiomatic that socialist system that suppresses and distorts almost every market signal; deprives individuals of the ability to make coherent economic choices; and resorts to force in an attempt to make its irrational system work; will fail in the end.

To the Russians who grew up in the system, or who grew up in the aftermath of its collapse, alas, it is not so obvious. As Gaidar notes, the fall of an empire seems anything but common sense to those that lived it. Putin and the siloviki are exploiting this to the hilt, and are perpetrating the myth that the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the economic and social chaos that followed this collapse was not due to the inherent defects of the Soviet economic system, but instead resulted from malign external forces. The recent "elections" indicate that large swaths of the Russian populace have fallen for this myth hook, line, and sinker.

So for the present, anyways, Gaidar is doomed to play the role of Cassandra, prophesying that disaster will follow Putin's Plan, but cursed to be disbelieved and ignored. Putin and the siloviki, like the Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They have not learned from what destroyed the Soviet Union, but have not forgotten that the Soviet Union was once a colossus before which the world trembled. They want to restore this colossus (admittedly, and happily, without all the totalitarian baggage), and are pursuing this goal relentlessly.

I believe that Gaidar is right that down this path lies ruin. I fear, however, that Russia will have to find this out the hard way. So Yegor Gaidar is a prophet without honor in his own country, among his own kin, and in his own house. But I believe he is a prophet nonetheless. And I heartily recommend that you read his excellent book.

Yegor Gaidar's Collapse of an Empire is an insider's view of the causes and events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The author is has a fascinating and improbable background. He served as acting Prime Minister, First Deputy Prime Minister, and Economics Minister of Russia under Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s but is an academic economist rather than a politician or bureaucrat. He received his PhD in economics under the Soviet educational system but, somehow, developed a solid understanding of economics of free markets. In Collapse of an Empire, Gaidar offers his historical and economic perspective on the Soviet collapse as a lesson and caution for today's Russia. It is as close to a definitive work on the Soviet collapse as I have yet read.

Gaidar starts with two general observations, one on empires and one on oil, and then proceeds to describe the Soviet Collapse.

Empires

Empires come in two flavors: Overseas empires (British, French, Dutch) and territorially contiguous empires (Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Soviet Union, and, on a smaller scale, Yugoslavia). Of these two types, the overseas empires are the easier to dismantle: The imperial power can simply declare the former colonies free and, possibly, repatriate a limited number of colonists with a claim to citizenship in the mother country. In territorial empires, diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious groups usually reside in close proximity to each other and often have longstanding conflicts over rights to land and under the law. Abolishing a territorial empire leaves all these conflicts in place, ready to boil over as soon as imperial control has been lifted. Members of the formerly dominant ethnic group may even find themselves a minority in one of the successor states and subject to the rule of one of their formerly subject people. Many of the troubled areas of the world today (Balkans, Middle East) are parts of former territorial empires where population segments have not succeeded in making peace with their neighbors.

Oil

Countries with significant natural resources, especially oil, have generally not been on the forefront of democracy or economic liberalism. Gaidar attributes this phenomenon to the steady stream of revenues the sale of oil provides the ruling party. Secured by this source of income, the government has no need to reach an accommodation with its people that gives them a voice in how they are governed. In exchange, the tax burden on the population often remains very light. The western democracies grew out of accommodations that essentially gave the people a voice in how their countries were governed in exchange for their acceptance of the government's imposition of taxes.

Soviet Collapse

Prior to WWI, Russia was one of the largest grain exporters in the world. In the West, industrialization followed the production of an agricultural surplus which released excess farm labor for industrial employment. Russia followed a different path after the Bolshevik revolution. Rather than building an agricultural surplus, Lenin and Stalin seized the grain and other agricultural products of the countryside to feed the urban and industrial populations. Simultaneously, they reallocated labor from agriculture to industry to support their goal of rapid industrialization. The result was an economic and human disaster. Soviet agriculture never recovered, never produced a sustained surplus, and the country became dependent on imported grain. (See Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow for details). By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was the world's largest grain importer.

At that time (the 1970s), the Soviets were able to pay for their grain imports by exporting oil. This was the time of high oil prices and the Arab embargo on oil exports to the US. Grain prices were low, so Soviet trade balanced nicely: Expensive exports, inexpensive imports.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran. These events led the Saudis to become concerned about a Soviet drive to the Persian Gulf and a threat to their kingdom. To counter this perceived threat, in the mid 1980s the Saudis greatly expanded their production and export of oil causing the world price to drop from the $30-40/bbl range to about $10/bbl. Obviously, this price change damaged the Soviet balance of trade.

At about the same time (mid 1980s), the world price of grain shot up significantly. This further damaged the Soviet trade balance.

If this wasn't enough, the volume of Soviet oil production declined in the late 1980s for two reasons. First, to generate foreign exchange, oil production had been focused on the most productive fields which were exploited at a rate that was harmful to the long-term productivity of the fields. Second, the reduced availability of foreign exchange and the continuing requirement to import grain led the Soviet government to reduce imports of industrial materials from the West, including equipment for oil drilling, production, and transport.

By 1989, food subsidies constituted a third of the Soviet national budget. Retail prices were fixed at artificially low levels, which was one form of subsidy. At the same time, the Soviet government was subsidizing the import and domestic production of food. The costs of producing or importing food were as much as 70% higher than the retail prices. With a net outflow of hard currency and a grossly imbalanced domestic budget, the only way to "pay" the government's bills was to print more rubles. With prices fixed by the state, the resulting inflation could only result in shortages at the retail level and a huge increase in individual "savings" since there was nothing for the population to buy with its rubles. By 1991, of 1200 officially recognized consumer goods, 1150 were not readily available.

Declining credit-worthiness drove most western commercial banks to refuse to make further loans to the Soviet government, leaving Gorbachev with only the option of begging for foreign aid from the capitalist governments. Gaidar even suggests that he made the following deal with George H. W. Bush at their Malta conference in 1989: In exchange for US financial assistance, the Soviet government will refrain from using force to maintain its control of its Eastern European satellites.

Throughout its 70+ years of existence, the mantra of the Soviet government and the Communist Party had been that The Party had a special role in the Soviet system because of its unique "wisdom", its understanding of communist economics and the Soviet man. By the late 1980s, the Russian people and even the Soviet bureaucracy knew that this was a lie. However, the inertia of the system did not allow The Party to admit it's "wisdom" had been wrong and that a major economic reform based on free markets was desperately needed.

By revealing the true history of the Soviet Union (e.g., the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), Glasnost destroyed any lingering myth of the legitimacy of the Soviet Empire. In the end, the Empire could only be maintained by force, but the use of that force would have ended any hope for financial aid from the West.

The August 1991 coup was only the farce that followed the tragedy that constituted the history of the Soviet Union.

Professor Gaidar has done it again! He has given us another thoughtful work on Russia, yet not purely from an economic perspective- although there is lots of that in the book- but in terms of the context of history. Readers new to Gaidar would do well to get hold of his work 'State and Evolution'. This work also brilliantly examines recent of events in Russia in the context of the development of nations.

I look forward to more from this man's pen. And my sincere appreciation to the Brooking Institute for making this work available in English. Possibly, with the level of interest in such a work, its sales may not be high and Broooking may be making a financial loss. But to readers like myself, I feel a great gratitude of debt to both the author and publisher.

Buy this book and enjoy an intellectual feast! It is simply fantastic!

Is this the English translation of the book published in Jerusalem in 1980? Margarita Aliger was the coauthor of that title, if I recall correctly.

If you know, please reply by responding to this comment. Thanks.

(BTW, haven't read the book, so I've given it five stars uslovno; if it's written by Grossman and Ehrenburg, it's guaranteed to be good, as far as I'm concerned)

I take this account from Robert Chandler's article on 'Life and Fate' which appeared in Prospect magazine. Chandler is one of Grossman's translators, and an outstanding interpreter and commentator on his work.


" In 1943, after the German surrender at Stalingrad, Grossman was with the first red army units to liberate the Ukraine. He learned about Babi Yar, where 100,000 people, most of them Jews, were massacred. Soon afterwards, in Berdichev, he learned the details of his mother's death. His story "The Old Teacher" and the article "Ukraine without Jews" are among the first accounts of the Shoah in any language. And Grossman's vivid yet sober "The Hell of Treblinka" (late 1944), the first article in any language about a Nazi death camp, was republished and used as testimony in the Nuremberg trials.

Grossman was the first to research both the massacres in the Ukraine that marked the beginning of the Shoah and the death camps of Poland that were its culmination. The SS tried to destroy all trace of Treblinka, but Grossman interviewed local peasants and the 40 survivors and reconstructed how the camp functioned. He writes perceptively about the role played by deceit, about how the "SS psychiatrists of death" managed "to confuse people's minds once more, to sprinkle them with hope... 'Women and children must take their shoes off... Stockings must be put into shoes ... Be tidy... Going to the bathhouse, you must have your documents, a towel...'"

The official Soviet line, however, was that all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler; the standard retort to those who emphasised the suffering of Jews was "Do not divide the dead!" Admitting that Jews constituted the overwhelming majority of the dead would have entailed admitting that other Soviet nationalities--and especially Ukrainians--had been accomplices in the genocide; in any case, Stalin was antisemitic. From 1943 to 1946, along with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman worked for the Jewish anti-fascist committee on The Black Book, a documentary account of the massacres of Jews on Soviet and Polish soil. It was never published."

Grossman, the great Soviet war correspondent was a heroic man of truth, who followed the Red Army in all the major battles of the war, including Stalingrad. The 'horrors' he saw in the concentration- camps moved him to the writing of this work. His own mother had been murdered in 1941 with thirty- thousand other Jews in the Ukranian town of Berditchev.
Only the realization that Stalin was deliberately persecuting the Jews led Grossman, an assimilated Jew to heroically identify with his own people.
His honesty, his courage in recording the horrible realities of this book are the very qualities which make him such a distinctively great writer.

This book provides considerable detail on the German murders of Jews in German-conquered eastern Poland and western Soviet Union, usually by mass shootings followed by either mass burial or mass cremations in open-air pyres. WARNING: The descriptions of both gratuitous and systematic German cruelties are graphic, even by Holocaust-material standards.

Although, not surprisingly, the narratives are laced with Communist propaganda, there is a surprising lack of contempt for religious people and the clergy. And nowhere in this book does Ilya Ehrenburg display his reputed collective hatred of Germans.

The narratives follow a geographic format. Interestingly, the massacre of the Jews of Edvabny (Jedwabne) is mentioned, but not any accusation of Poles being responsible (p. 205). This contrasts with the attention devoted to Baltic collaborators in their German-occupied nations.

Perennial complaints about "Soviet citizens" and unequal victims seem baseless in view of the constant reference to Jews as victims. Moreover, Grossman (p. xxix) explicitly distinguishes between the fates of non-Jews and Jews: "In many places the murder of local residents--of Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians--was merely the first step toward the realization of Hitler's intended program of the eventual extermination of the Slavic people. With regard to the Jews, fascism implemented its bloody plans immediately and universally."

This volume provides one of the earliest postwar comprehensive accounts on the modus operandi of the German death camps, especially Treblinka (pp. 462-487) and Auschwitz (pp. 500-532). A Jewish-Soviet commission arrived at a figure of 4 million victims of the Auschwitz complex (p. 501, 513-514). This debunks the myth of this highly-inflated figure being some sort of later Polish invention designed to hide the Jewishness of most Auschwitz victims.

In his NEIGHBORS and FEAR, Jan T. Gross would have us believe that Poles habitually delighted in Jewish sufferings, and were intoxicated with greed towards Jewish properties. The Soviet-Jewish editors of this volume indicate just the opposite: "Honest Poles and Ukrainians were deeply disturbed by these unprecedented crimes, by the mass extermination of completely innocent people." (p. 83). "Many Jews hid among the Poles and Ukrainians. No matter how much the Germans tried to corrupt the souls of the people with the threat of death, execution, treachery, and greed, the people remained brave, honorable, and capable of heroic deeds. The Polish intelligentsia saved many Jewish children from death." (p. 84). Much the same situation prevailed in Byelorussia: "It must be said during those troubled times the friendship between Poles and Jews generally burned bright. The fascists were able to organize only the dregs of society and set them against the defenseless, persecuted Jewish people." (p. 198). The last quoted statement is identical to the conventional Polish position: Polish collaborators and killers of Jews consisted of marginal members of Polish society--again refuting Gross.

The editors of this volume provided one of the earliest postwar accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. They recognize the assistance and involvement of Poles to a much greater extent than do most Holocaust materials. There is a unit of the AK mentioned, along with its act of engaging the German sentries in combat, which enabled Jews to escape the ghetto (p. 549, 557). A partial list is provided of Poles who died fighting alongside, and on behalf of, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (p. 554)

I have just finished reading The Complete Black Book and will try to express the effect it has had on me. I am old enough to have been a WW11 veteran that was in Germany in 1945 and had met up with the Red Army soldiers in Braunschweig close to the Elbe River. I drove past the Bergan-Belsen concentration camp when the victims still alive were sitting on the ground by the road in their stripped uniforms.But now after so many years having passed, to read the Complete Black book leaves one in a state utterly disoriented and confounded as to the true nature of the human species.

Lest one, at least of the younger generation, has not given thought to, or realized the depth to which human depravity can fall, or forgets, or wishes to forget, even though mayhem and mass murder persist in our contemporary world, one ought not be oblivious to the fact that human depravity is of serious concern. .

We don't want to be reminded, its too stressful. Most of us who are alive and have a fleeting knowledge of the unbelievable, the facts that evoke frightening, painful thoughts. That monstrous catastrophe that had happened in the not too distant past is for most of us too difficult to feel the impact of its true nature. Though many victims are still among the living, that horrible event could only be treated by most as something we knew about and was easily forgotten. We cannot dwell on such hideous thoughts. If we are alive we must dance, sing and search for the way to happiness, that is the way of human nature. But wait, are we living amidst humans who are in possession of evil genes? Are we really frightened when it comes to thinking about what our species is really capable of?

A grief stricken mournful cry of the ages against human violence was compiled and published by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, in their monumental, soul searing work, "The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry". Can this deliberate and depraved slaughter of millions of human beings be true; the crushing and tearing apart of every Jewish child the Hitlerites got their hands on? How is this possible from an advanced Western society, as was Germany, with its highly developed cultural life?

Shocked by what he experienced and perceived to be the insane decision of the Germans to murder every Jew on the face of the Earth or at least every Jew they could get their hands on. Ilya Ehrenburg, the prodigious and serious writer that he was, felt in the extreme that it was his obligation to see that every detail, of the German atrocities he could uncover was preserved and duly placed on the record for all the world to know. With the support of the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee he with the equally great writer, Vasily Grossman, enlisted some twenty-four reporters to gather eyewitness accounts of the hideous torture and murder of Soviet Jews, captured Red Army soldiers and communists.
.

By the fall of 1944 Ehrenburg and Grossman had a finished work ready for publication. Ehrenburg was most anxious to get the work printed and out to the world. But there were signs all around that this was not to happen so easily.First, and most depressing for Ehrenburg, were the roadblocks being placed before the work by the Jewish Antifascist Committee, they wanted to eliminate any references to the traitors among the Ukranians, Lithuanians and others who collaborated with the Germans openly, helping them to slaughter Jews. "Events soon discouraged him altogether" wrote Joshua Rubenstein. "Sometime in late 1944 over five hundred pages of The Black Book were sent to the United States for distribution. Ehrenburg was furious. No one had asked for his permission or even informed him of the request from America. Ehrenburg immediately understood that once the material appeared in the West it would be harder to publish in Moscow. He wanted the book to appear first in the Soviet Union where it was most needed to combat domestic anti-Semitism....Ehrenburg believed committee leaders deliberately undermined what he was trying to accomplish. Furious he broke off with the JAC and began referring to it as the `Judenrat' or the `anti-Jewish committee' in the presence of startled Jewish partisans." (1)

With this going on Ehrenburg was fearful that his friend Stalin would not sanction the work. For the Soviet government, all Jews were Soviet citizens and recognized only as such. But clearly to Ehrenburg and Grossman there was no denial that the Jews alone were held in a special and separate category, targeted by the Germans for extermination. This the Germans exploited to further their imperialist ambitions with the propaganda that the Jews were the sole cause of all their troubles. Further obstacles hampered a quick publication of the Ehrenburg - Grossman work when an appeal was sent to Andrei Zhdanov, the new secretary of the Central Committee."He sent the letter to the propaganda department who responded that the Black Book had `grave political errors' and forbade publication."(2) This pretty much crushed Ehrenburg after the years of heroic work struggling to collect the facts and document the history of the excruciating human suffering of the Jews and the repugnant human depravity of the Germans.

Until the time of his death in 1967, Ehrenburg, deeply saddened, had failed to see his wish fulfilled with the publication of his book in the Soviet Union "In 1993 the original Black Book, the version that had been approved for publication in 1946 and then forbidden in 1947 was finally published by the Jewish publishing houseYad in Vilnius."(3) This present edition, the English translation of the original 1993 edition was first published in 2002, "This is the book which Ilya Ehrenburg, and after his death, his daughter, Irina Ehrenburg dreamed and worked to have published."(4)

To immerse one self in the task of recording the history as Ehrenburg and Grossman did was almost like submitting oneself to becoming a victim. Describing the hideous procedure, the cold and calculating German action, brutes capable of laughing and joking, of taking photographs of human beings, stripped of their clothing, forced to dig their own graves and lie in them to be shot while atop blood covered victims, already shot dead. The Spanish Inquisition with its thirty-two thousand burnt at the stake, though no less an atrocity, it could not reach the intensity of the German slaughter of the one and a half million Soviet Jews that the Einsatzgruppen with their machine guns blew out the brains of beautiful and good people while smashing the heads of babies against any hard surface.The lives of every Jew that fell into the hands of the German brutes was brought to a horrendous end. It was the determination of the Germans to torture and murder every captured Red Army soldier. The Red Army prisoner, M. Sheinman, stated:

In the camp at Zhitomir the invaders first tried to exterminate all the Jews and political workers, so that they could then slowly and methodically exterminate thousans of prisoners of other nationalities. All the new arrivals had to file past a special "commission." The ones identified as Jews were turned over to the SS. They were housed separately from the other prisoners and forced to do the hardest and filthiest work. They were fed only once every three days. Every night the Gestapo and their dogs would go to the prisoners' barracks. The dogs would pounce on the people, biting and tearing at them. After being endlessly humiliated, they were taken outside of the town and shot....There were 1,500 people in Wesuw, most of whom were dying of tuberculosis. [After our liberation from Wesuw, British and Canadian soldiers and doctors came and asked those who were dying from tuberculosis how they had come to such a state. They heard shocking tales of how] the Germans sent young and healthy people, captured soldiers and officiers of the Red Army to mines and factories: there the prisoners were force to work fourteen and sixteen hours a day on one or two liters of soup made from grass and turnips and 250 grams of bread. People were subjected to humiliations and tortures never before heard of....But even in the death camps prisoners were not allowed to die peacefully. The butchers tortured them up to the last minutes of their lives with hunger, cold, beatings and other atrocities... Only the twisted mind of a sadist could have devised the system of torture that existed in the camps, especially for the officers, the politicals, and the Jews.


The Black Book, is a record of a period of history of modern times, a history of human events that should stand today as a seminal work. It causes one to question the true nature of the human species, causes us, after experiencing,through the pages of the Black Book the shocking depths of depravity to which the human is capable of and has fallen. It is a worrisome thing when we stop and think about it.The power of The Black Book is reenforced and complimented with the publication of Jasenovac And The Holocaust In Yugoslavia by Barry M. Lituchy, a work in which the atrocities committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union are repeated under the guidance of the Germans in Yugoslavia.-This raises the question about whether the existance of the inate evil nature of the human is suppressed or encouraged to develop within the structure of the social system which nurtures it - broadly speaking - the two diametrically opposed systems - one capitalist and the other communist?

This is a reminder that we cannot turn our backs on those millions trapped in the execution machine of the Germans and most cruelly slaughtered. The Black Book and Jasenovac, amongst others serve as a clear warning today when we still witness so much inhuman activity. In the preface of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewrey Vasily Grossman wrote; "Here we should recall the words of Stalin, written in response to a request from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in America:

In answer to your question, nationalistic and racist chauvinism is a vestige of customs characteristic of a period of cannibalism. As the extreme form of racist chauvinism, anti-Semitism is the most dangerous vestige of cannabalism. Like a lightning rod protecting capitalism from the blow of the workers, anti-Semitism benefits their exploiters. Anti-Semitism is dangerous for workers, a false path leading them from the true way and luring them into a jungle. Therefore in keeping with their international outlook, communists cannot help but be the implacable and sworn enemies of anti-Semitism. In the USSR anti-Semitism is prosecuted in the most sever manner as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet order. In accordance with the laws of the USSR, active anti-Semites receive the death penalty.
J.Stalin (6)


1- Joshua Rubenstein, "Tangled Loyalties" p.216
2- Ibid. p. 217
3- Helen Segall, "Black Book" .p. xv
4- Ibid.
5- "Black Book" p.430
6- Ibid. p.xxv


Philip Stein

Review of The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry by
Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman

The best of Irish country cooking all in one volume! Stews,Casseroles, nourishing natural country foods.Excellent!

A very nice cookbook,with plenty of color photos & clear concise instructions,covers all the food groups,beautifully done.

A very nice cookbook,with plenty of color photos & clear concise instructions,covers all the food groups,beautifully done.

I have always been fascinated by the homey and satisfying food of traditional Irish cooking. This book is full of information on different traditional Irish dishes. There are no contemporary or imaginative dishes in here, and many don't sound very appetizing.(does oatmeal soup sound good to anyone?) That is not the point of this book though. The point is to preserve the dishes that the earliest settlers in Ireland lived off of, and to preserve the Irish heritage in doing so. Miss Allen puts a large emphasis on using seasonal, organic ingredients that are naturally available to you. If you're interested in traditional Irish cookery, this book is well worth the money.

This is the definitive source on the British peerage up to 1938. (Vol. XIV, printed recently and sold separately, updates the saga to the late 1990's.) This 4 to 1 microprint version of the original pages still leaves reasonably legible print; having a reader's magnifier might also be useful for some. The vols are well produced and come in an embossed slipcase, and though sturdy my slipcase was significantly damaged in transit (two front-to-back edges totally broken so that the case would not hold together) with subsequent pleas for amends falling on deaf ears.

This is a reprint, printed in 2000, reducing 4-1 the pages of the orignal 13 volumes into 6 volumes. The orignal was published between 1910 and 1938, so this set does not include information more recent then 1938. Be sure to track down Vol. XIV, published in 1998, to complete the information. Otherwise this is excellent information.

Begun by George E. Cokayne, the Clarenceaux King-of-Arms, this set is to the British peerage what the Oxford English Dictionary is to the English language -- absolutely the best thing of its kind. Citations to primary sources frequently fill 3/4 of the page and anecdotal text-notes put some meat on the bones. Far superior to the 19th century Burke's Peerage publications. Don't attempt serious British research without it! The numerous appendices at the ends of the volumes also are highly recommended as instructive essays.

This is by far the most complete and enjoyable peerage resource, in that it gives the full history of EVERY peerage created up to the 20th century. You cannot get more complete than this. The new edition means that people can actually buy it without going bankrupt and it will be an invaluable resource for genealogists and for people who like to look up old books just for fun as well. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL CREATED MODERN IRAQ (Carroll and Graf, 2004)

Gerald Wood has written an incredibly inciteful book on this young Irishman who has yet to be fully recognised in his mother country. Mr Wood has guided us through the plays and scripts of McPherson and it becomes very obvious from the moment you read the first few pages that this is an author who has tremendous knowledge of the world McPherson comes from. It came as quite a shock to me to discover that Mr Wood is from the US but his ability to understand the concept of "The Irish Author" is remarkable. I can truthfully recommend this book to all students and professors of Irish theatre. It is a concise and very readable book and does not attempt to suffocate the reader with excessive analytical language. I agree with the above reader regarding "I Went Down." This film is one of the best we have ever seen produced in this country on such a limited budget. Hope to see more from MacPherson and Mr Wood in the near future. Excellent!

I found this book to be an excellent study and introduction to McPherson's work. Mr. Wood's analysis seems to be spot-on to me, and he makes some numerous insightful observations. Indeed, this Liffey Series is very good.

I'll admit that I have always found McPherson's work to be wildly inconsistent. Some of the plays are great (Rum & Vodka), while I always thought that others, particularly The Weir, were overvalued. My favorite is probably the movie I Go Down. This book does a good job of giving an overview of McPherson's work, and has made me better appreciate some of the plays that didn't originally mean much to me. In fact, Wood's book makes me curious about what the future holds for McPherson. I recommend this book highly.

I'm glad to see McPherson's work getting some study, especially in the US. I found this book to be a great introduction to the Irishman's works, and the author, Wood, seems to really know his stuff. Not only that, but the book is really readable. So much scholarship is poorly written, but this book is clear and intelligent without being confusing. For anyone interested in contemporary Irish writers, this book is a must for your bookshelf.

This is an interesting and well written guidebook. It was mentioned on NPR I think once and it was well deserved. Finally a guidebook for active but not agile among us. A must have for any trip to Scotland.

The Creaky Traveler In The North West Highlands Of Scotland by experienced world traveler Warren Rovetch is a personal memoir and engaging travelogue of Britain's coastal wilderness. Penned with insight, charm, and vibrant impressions of culture, natural beauty, and the unique feel of the land itself, The Creaky Traveler is a very highly recommended, expressive, and readable Scottish Highlands guide for vacationers and armchair travelers alike.

Yes this is a travel book with advice on how to get there and what to see, but really it is a book about our nature in seeking the unusual by seeing the common in a new way. It also happens to be just plain good writing-- a joy to read and to savor, like the travels in the wilds of Scotland that the book describes.

THE CREAKY TRAVELER provides an amazing amount of detail (including maps) about a small part of the northwest highlands of Scotland. Mr Rovetch has a friendly and somewhat avuncular writing style which verges on the pedantic at times. He obviously kept a diary of his travels from which this text has been extracted (the minutia could only be recorded not remembered). I found some of the detail annoying for "armchair travel" but useful for objectively planning road travel in remote Scotland. After using it to plan a trip,THE CREAKY TRAVELER is the sort of book one reads a chapter a night on the road to scope out the next day's adventures.

Rovetch and his wife Gerda who prefers the sobriquet "G" are in their late sixties-early seventies and still mobile, though as he says "not agile." Although Rovetch provides helpful hints for "older" folks, younger adventurers may find many of the suggestions useful. I bought the book because I have been seriously contemplating visiting the highlands when I travel to the UK this summer. Rovetch has convinced me road travel is the only way to go, and road travel in northwest Scotland cannot be knocked out in a few days. Also, if you truly hope to "see" anything, high summer is probably not the very best time to go.

Rovetch suggests limiting the miles covered to under 20 per day given the condition of the roads (the path is narrow and the way is hard) and the joy of slowly savoring one of the world's most beautiful rural areas. Rovetch and G made their several week journey in May when the countryside was filled with new lambs and few tourists. The places they stayed were picturesque and relatively pricey. This is a good guide for the practical traveler.