Archive for World War II
Pointe-du-Hoc, the deadly cliff
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags Calvados, Channel, cliffs, D Day, fortifications, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, US Army Provisional Ranger Group, Utah Beach, World War II on January 27, 2026 by xi'an
the amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay [book review]
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags Antarctica, antisemitism, Aryan ideology, Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, book review, Citizen Kane, comics, Czechoslovakia, Eleanor Roosevelt, emigration, Empire State building, Germany, golem, homophobia, Houdini, integration, Jotunheimen, Kefauver Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Nazis, New York city, New York Society Library Book Award, New York World’s Fair, Orson Welles, Pearl Harbour, Prague, Pullitzer Prize for Fiction, Queen Maud, Rosa Luxemburg, Salvador Dali, super heroes, U-boats, United States of America, Will Eisner, World War II, WW II, Yiddish on August 2, 2024 by xi'an
After reading the (pretty good) Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, I found out this earlier book had won a Pullitzer prize for fiction and decided to give it a go. Which lasted for weeks as I found the book very slow paced, to the point of always falling asleep within a few pages. The pace sort of accelerated in the second half, sort of coïnciding with Pearl Harbour and the formal entry of the United States of America into the war. At the beginning it felt too much like a transposition of my former read and despite the multiple covariates with a positive coefficient (comics, Prague, the golem, Rosa Luxemburg, New York City, the silliness of the superhero concept, esp. when repeated week after week, the ambivalence of the very notion as well, when considering the closeness between Supermen and Hitler’s Übermensch), I had a hard time engaging with the story. Maybe due to the lengthy sentences and descriptions which, as I read later in a review, were intended to supplement the absence of visual representations that (obviously) come with a graphical novel. Maybe due to the millefeuille of literary styles and fields and of parallel stories with a myriad of characters and places.
“Besotted with language and brimming with pop culture, political relevance and bravura storytelling…” The New York Times
I clearly am a minority in enjoying the book so little. The Guardian put it within its 100 best books of the 21st Century. If in the second half. And so did the New York Times. In its 16th position. There is even a (inactive) website on the book! Actually, the massive injection within the actual history of America and Europa at these most tragic times makes the novel an epic, helped with a witty and mostly understated humour. There are indeed lots of actual facts and characters, the book deeply digs into the history of the time. While indirect snapshots of the unrolling Holocaust are ghastly, Both the sinking of the orphan boat (presumably inspired by the all too real attack on the City of Benares) and the Antarctica part during WW II are sheer fiction (despite a long-going myth of Nazi bases there). But a compelling part of the novel, paradoxically.
anyone can turn into a refugee
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags D Day, Gaza, Gaza war, Normandy, refugees, Russian invasion, Saint-Lô, Ukraine invasion, World War II, WW II on June 23, 2024 by xi'an
When I visited my mother last month for the Pegasus half-marathon, celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the D Day landing were starting in Normandy. And she talked with us of the days around the event, when as a 5y old she had to flee (under German occupation troops’orders) her family house in Saint-Lô, that had been hit by Allied shells and stay with other refugees in the nearby countryside, for several weeks, eating meat from cows killed during the combats and the few products the local farm was able to provide. When the Allied troops managed to push further inland, they returned to the house, which had been mostly looted, and decided to move to my grandfather’s birthplace, 50km away, by foot and with a wheelbarrow to carry the 5y and 4y old girls. They arrived to find that my great-grand-mother’s house had also been destroyed, by a bomb this time, but that she was alive and leaving with relative in the countryside, which is where they spent the remaining months of 1944, before settling for 35y in another small western Normandy town… During this conversation, she repeatedly mentioned how strongly she was relating with the victims of the current refugee crises, both in Ukraine and Gaza, in that she knew from experience how quickly and irremediably one could become a refugee thrown on the dangerous roads of a war zone, with hardly any remaining belongings…
Jean Zay (1904-1944)
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS, French education ministry, French history, Front populaire, Jean Zay, Musée d'Art Moderne, Musée de l'Homme, supercomputer, Vichy régime, World War II on June 21, 2024 by xi'an
Russian war on civilians
Posted in Statistics with tags booby traps, cluster munitions, Geneva Conventions, land mines, Russian Federation, Russian invasion, Solidarity with Ukraine, Soviet era, Stop the War, The New York Times, Ukraine, war crimes, World War II on June 24, 2022 by xi'an
