Product Description

In her major study the historian Erna Paris addresses one of the most urgent issues facing the world today - who owns and controls the past? - for decisions taken by those in power cast long shadows into the future. It is a powerful theme, but what makes her book compelling reading is that she pursues these demanding moral questions as a personal quest, building up the big picture from a series of intimate conversations with people who have lived that history or are living with its consequences. Starting with the aftermath of World War II in France, Germany and Japan, she loops back to the legacy of slavery in the American South, before moving on to South Africa, Bosnia and Rwanda, and to Argentina and Chile as she charts two competing drives - the potentially corrupting desire to control the past in order to shape the future and the aspiration to achieve a standard of universal justice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #228591 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Evening Standard
'timely and commendalbe'

IRIS CHANG, author of The Rape of Nanking
"Long Shadows is magnificent"

From the Publisher
"Ernas Paris's extraordinary journey of a book is a passionate, eloquent and timely voice of opposition to those who would fashion history as an instrument of power, not of memory and struggle"
John Pilger

Customer Reviews

Responsibility, Acountability & Morality
As a believer in the ultimate virtue of the human species, I found Paris's book a compelling read. if you have ever wonder how very ordinary (and often, less than ordinary) people inflict pain and suffering on their own species and still live normal lives where they can be pillars of the community, then this book is for you.

Paris takes a number of high-profile historical examples where individuals and groups exploited a political or social system that allowed, or often facilitated, them in projecting themselves and/or their prejudices to the detriment of others.

Nazism, Slavery, Apartheid, Ethnic cleansing are the subjects she explores with a keen insight into the contradictions in human nature, and the appalling cruelty and hypocracy that people can indulge in. She approaches the sensitive subject with humanity, intelligence and an amazing sense of imparitality in reporting both sides of the story.

This is a profound book that rewards re-reading.

It shows what man is capable of
you cannotleave out the terrible wrong that was crried out against the first inhabitants of that country One does not sell the earth one walks on TARHAKA WITKO [CRAZY HORSE]

homelands,and deprived of their main sorce of food She then goes on to write that Sherman promised each slave 40acres of land and a mule[p188],this was the Sherman along with Miles and Crook were committing genocide against the Indian Nations. Surely if you write about injustice in a country

I have just finished reading `Long Shadows`,and I found chapter 4 extraordinary,Erin Paris wrote 80+ pages about the terrible way the african slaves were treated,but does not mention one word about the American Indian who at the same time period in history were being driven from their

An amazing journey into the history of memory
Of all the books I've read this year, this probably has the greatest effect on the way that I think. Paris writes with the comepetence and skill of a much older historian, whilst keeping her history accesible to both the younger generation and us non-intellectuals out there. Through her explorations of history and memory Paris devles deeply into the human psyche, and the way we deal with both disaster and triumph. This book also deals with the devestation felt by wartime survivors and their ways of coping. It is a great momento to both the power of the human spirit and its will to develop and move on, as well as an awful reminder of how many countries citizens will never be able to come to terms with the atrocities comitted for the sake of their homeland.