Nearly a decade ago, as part of the Jewish Film Festival, I viewed The Specialist, a documentary on the April 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel. I recall being rivetted and my wayward memory still harbours a few images of pasty-faced, didactic Eichmann defending himself (unsuccessfully, he was hanged a year later). What [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
The Guardian has a story told by a 32-year-old survivor who lost all his family except for two cousins.
Apparently Barack Obama, in a speech in Ghana over the weekend, explicitly tagged the horrors in Darfur as genocide (see this Associated Press article). A Sudanese spokesman said the word was ‘regrettable.’ Notwithstanding Obama’s recognition of what is happening in Darfur, my impression is that his Ghana speech disappointed human rights activists (see for example [...]
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Tanzania, has found Tharcisse Renzaho, former governor of Kigali (Rwanda’s capital) guilty on five counts, one of which is genocide, and sentenced him to life. I don’t have many details yet but check out this brief New York Times article. Perhaps I’m wrong but this sounds like [...]
I stumbled across Errol Morris a few years back at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which screened double features presenting pairs of his remarkable interviews with remarkable people. He has a way of zooming in on interviewees’ faces (is it true that he wears a camera on his head or is that an urban myth?) [...]
Also posted in Film, Vietnam Redux |
I’ve been attending this for six or seven years, although I did stand out for a couple of years because it is such an intense experience. Unfortunately, I cannot make myself attend just one or two sessions – as soon as I work through the program I grow too excited for modest exposure. This year, [...]
Today’s The Australian Literary Review contains Delia Falconer’s respectful yet constructively critical review of Killing: Misadventures in Violence by Melbourne author Jeff Sparrow. I’ve read one of Sparrow’s so-called radical histories of our city, which I enjoyed, though probably there is some philosophical distance between us. One of my shelves of books, the one dedicated [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Birkenau, one of the three Auschwitz camps, was amongst the worst German death camps. The Sonderkommando were prisoners (mostly Jewish) forced to carry out the most hellish tasks of all. Their job was to drag the gassed corpses out of the Zyklon B chambers, to cut their hair off (and all the other bestial violations [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
In his May 4 article in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch, a genuine hero of mine, brings signs of hope from Rwanda, fifteen years after the genocide. I trust Gourevitch, having read all his stuff and seen him speak a few times, so it was with considerable delight that I read about President Paul Kagame’s rebuilding efforts [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
I, together with the men in my book group, read John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in February 2006. I, and most of the group, praised the book’s unconventional, freshly revealing look at the Holocaust. The book’s narrative frame is quite simple: an eight-year-old German boy moves with his father, a soldier the [...]