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A landmark moment in Holocaust history and memory occurred in 1989 when about 1,000 Kindertransport survivors attended their 50-year reunion in London. The event commemorated the transport of 10,000 children from Central Europe to safety in Britain. Launched on November 9, 1938, the transport continued for a year until the Nazis ended it when war was declared in September 1939.
The Holocaust, which caused so many resignifications and dissolutions of post-war cultural forms and paradigms, from the deconstruction of grand historical narratives to the shattering of the idea of progress, has not exhausted its capacity to urge reflection or attempts at explanation, as well as fascination, obsession, hypocrisy and often despair.
Wasteland with Words is a very welcome addition to the small number of academic books about Iceland’s modern history available in English. The few other works on modern Icelandic history are largely written in Icelandic for local consumption.
‘Every means of defence will be put into action to stop enemy aircraft. However, some may get through […] If nothing holds you back, as soon as the threat arrives, LEAVE! [...] LEAVE with your family. DO NOT WAIT. LEAVE.’(1)
The title of this volume is something of a misnomer or, at least, there is a crucial word missing from it.
The First World War was a terrible experience that most soldiers were shocked by once they became active participants. How were soldiers’ able to cope with the grim realities of this war? How were they able to keep going in spite of losing close friends and comrades in one battle after another?
Donald Filtzer has added another major book to his long and impressive contribution to the study of Soviet history. It is a formidably detailed analysis of urban living conditions during the late Stalinist period, from the closing stages of the Second World War to the death of Stalin in 1953. While it bears Professor Filtzer’s unmistakable mark, it is also something of a new departure.
The revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky famously proclaimed in his suicide note, ‘the love boat has crashed against byt.’ That the banal problems of everyday life (byt) had undermined the hopes of the Revolution has since been widely inferred in evaluations of the Soviet system.
Historians of nursing in Britain have long been fighting for a place in the history of medicine. For example, of the 718 pages of text in Roy Porter’s best-selling The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, only five are concerned with nursing, and these, inevitably, with Florence Nightingale and 19th-century hospital reform.
Japanese Society at War deepens our understanding of the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on Japanese society.