How do nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events? Who gets to decide what happened yesterday, then to propagate the tale, and what are the consequences of their choices? These are some of the questions author and historian Erna Paris carried with her through the United States, with its long-buried memory of slavery, to South Africa, to sit in on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's attempts to heal the divisions of apartheid, to Japan, France and Germany and the unresolved pain of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and to the former Yugoslavia where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory, and the way the world community responded to the lethal outcome of that half-imagined history.Combining gripping storytelling with insight and sharp observation, Paris takes us to the places of reckoningbe they courtrooms or concentration campsand finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with the defining events of their lives. Evocatively written, her journey illuminates a crucial subject that straddles the 20th and 21st centuries.
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978-0-345-81008-3 (9780345810083)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Erna Paris is the winner of ten national and international writing awards, including the Canada-U.S. White Award for journalism, a gold medal from the National Magazine Awards Foundation, and four Media Club of Canada awards for feature writing and radio documentary. She is the author of five previous acclaimed books of literary non-fiction, most recently The End of Days: Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which won the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for History. She lives in Toronto.
