Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday December 28, 2010
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THE TURQUOISE LEDGE
Leslie Marmon Silko
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022113
319 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Gregory McNamee
Walk through a field in Maryland or along a run in Northern Virginia, and you're likely to find treasures in the grass and dark earth: perhaps an arrowhead, a bit of flint washed down from the Appalachians, a Minie ball from some long-ago skirmish.
Walk through a dry wash in the Sonoran Desert, as Leslie Silko has been doing daily for the last 30-odd years, and you're likely to find legions of rattlesnakes guarding hidden seams of chrysocolla, gold and other precious metals -- which inspire her memoir's title, "Turquoise Ledge." Likelier you will find lesser stones, "pieces of light gray and pale orange quartzite with smooth surfaces and interesting rectangular shapes." You may spot a coyote, a javelina, a ghost or two. You may even see an extra-terrestrial -- in which case, you might be advised to head in the other direction.
Silko, a Native American writer and artist, came to her home in the gnarled, ancient Tucson Mountains in 1978, when her now-classic novel "Ceremony" appeared. The city of Tucson was a minor mecca for writers in the '70s, populated, at least part-time, by Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Joy Williams, Scott Momaday and Richard Russo, among many other well-known authors, but it was also remote enough that a person could get away quickly, bolt from downtown to desert in 15 minutes. Silko found a place as far out on the edge of town as it was possible to get, a landscape of wild horses and towering saguaro cacti, and made herself at home in a desert that is demanding on even the best of days.
The best parts of her memoir recount moments that many desert dwellers will instantly recognize: the near-ecstasy that comes when a cloud decides to open up and spatter a little rain on the ground, the feel of shuddering summer heat on the skin, "how luxurious it feels to move through this yellow dawn light."
The more offbeat parts are engaging, too, if sometimes puzzling. Silko is certain that spirits inhabit her laundry room and even the clouds that pass overhead. She is just as certain that visitors from afar called Star Beings -- perhaps the ones Stephen Hawking has lately been telling us about -- have selected her to be a kind of interpreter for them: "They chose me to make their portraits because they want images that are accessible to ordinary people, to the masses, not to some rarefied audience."
And she gives dozens of pages over to chronicling the way of the local snakes, which she catalogues in careful detail: Here is Grandfather Rattler, there a tiny relative called Evo Atrox. Suffice it to say that if you have a fear of our slithering friends, this may not be the book for you.
Stone and ghosts are timeless things, but the desert is not, not while the busy descendants of Columbus are intent on chewing it up. In a dramatic turn, Silko writes of coming upon a piece of construction equipment down in a wash, the kind of yellow machine on which Abbey encouraged desert dwellers to practice unauthorized maintenance, and of battling it by painting warding-off symbols taught to her by those Star Beings. The signs spooked the machine's owner, who read them as gang symbols -- not a bad guess in Tucson and not far from the mark, given Silko's extraterrestrial and otherworldly allies.
Silko writes of many things, with affectionate portraits of friends and family and sharply observed notes on history, personal and universal. She laments the poisoning of her sisters by radioactive fallout from atomic-bomb tests in the 1950s -- a fate she avoided somehow. She voices occasional regrets, such as not having learned how to speak her ancestral Laguna language.
(She is certain, too, that 500 years from now all North Americans will speak Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, rather than English or Spanish, and so she has been studying that tongue.) At dazzling moments, she pulls seemingly disconnected themes together: turquoise, rain, Aztec mythology and language, the otherworld and other worlds ("It makes me happy to know that Nahuatl has a word for space ship") and, yes, snakes.
But apart from dropping a tantalizing hint or two -- a memory, for instance, that as a child at Laguna Pueblo, she told a pair of disbelieving Anglo tourists that she intended to become a playwright, for "I knew a playwright made up stories" -- she avoids the one subject that students of her work have been wanting her to address: namely, her development as a writer, one who is now considered among the best Native American novelists.
That awaits another book. Meanwhile, this one will do just fine, rattlesnakes, extra-terrestrials and all.
Gregory McNamee lives in Tucson, Ariz. His latest book is "Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BLOODLANDS: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Timothy Snyder
Basic
ISBN 978-0465002399
524 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Richard Rhodes
Ten years ago I traveled to Belarus to examine the killing sites of the early Holocaust. My host, Stanislav Shushkevich, who had been the new country's first head of state, was more than willing to show me the places where SS killers had shot Belorussian Jewish men, women and children into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands -- but first he wanted to show me where Soviet killers, just a few years earlier, had murdered hundreds of thousands of other Belorussians. My book "Masters of Death" told the story of the early "bullet" Holocaust that pushed out from Germany up through Latvia and down into Ukraine in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Now, in a more comprehensive narrative, Yale historian Timothy Snyder enlarges the perspective to include Stalin's slaughters as well as Hitler's.
Snyder identifies three phases of mass killing in what he chillingly calls the "Bloodlands" of Eastern Europe: deliberate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and German killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of more than 5 million Jews by the Germans between 1941 and 1945. Snyder estimates the death toll from all this deliberate killing at 14 million. How did Stalin and Hitler justify such slaughter? Were there parallels or commonalities between the two?
Stalin forced famine upon Soviet Ukraine and the Caucasus to collectivize farming, appropriating it to feed the workers as the U.S.S.R. rapidly industrialized. He did so by authorizing impossible production quotas and confiscating even the seed grain. The millions who starved in their scraped fields in the early 1930s were blamed for their own deaths, their starvation evidence that they had deliberately sabotaged production to subvert the government's plans. A second round of mass killing in the late '30s targeted Stalin's former associates as well as quotas of random victims, consolidating his power while installing terror as the basic mechanism of state authority. Decapitating the Soviet military by imprisoning or executing almost all its general officers nearly cost the country its survival when Germany invaded it in a surprise attack in 1941.
Hitler imagined the Bloodlands to be places of colonization, like India and Africa for England, Belgium and France and Native America for the United States. The Poles would be worked to death, the Russians allowed to starve to free up the Bloodlands granary to feed Germans. After the victory, retired SS warrior-farmers would establish utopian agricultural colonies to block the Asiatic hordes pressing westward over the Urals. Rather than feed Soviet prisoners of war, of which there were millions, the Wehrmacht callously confined them behind barbed wire without shelter or food; it was from this wretched mass that the SS selected laborers to dig its killing pits and, later, guard its death camps.
Debate has long raged among historians about the timing of the Final Solution decision. Snyder, in my opinion correctly, identifies "four distinct versions of the Final Solution" that preceded the actual hecatomb: "the Lublin plan for a (Jewish) reservation in eastern Poland," Jewish emigration into the Soviet Union with Stalin's consent (which he refused), Jewish resettlement in Madagascar (which the British navy would have blocked), and forced emigration into the Soviet Union after the German invasion.
When these alternatives failed, Hitler in the summer of 1941 ordered the Jews of Europe directly killed because he judged them to be uniquely dangerous. The SS-Einsatzgruppen -- special task forces -- that Heinrich Himmler sent into Poland and the Soviet Union in the wake of the German invasion benefited from the jails full of corpses that the Soviet NKVD forces had left behind. "The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions," Snyder writes, "confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. ... The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well."
Snyder's research is careful and thorough, his narrative powerful, if inevitably restrained. His interpretation of the events he describes is less confident, however. He is clear that the influence of "modernity," as some have theorized, is hardly an adequate explanation for the Holocaust. But in attributing the Nazi shift from shooting to gassing to the gas chamber's supposedly greater "efficiency," he overlooks the very evidence he cites. The death camps seldom managed as many as 6,000 deaths in a day, while 34,000 were shot to death in Kiev's Babi Yar ravine in two days in September 1941, more than 40,000 in Romania "in a few days" that December. Another 40,000 were shot at Maly Trastsianets, one of the sites outside Minsk that Shushkevich took me to see. "Nearly half" of the 5.4 million Jews who died "under German occupation," Snyder summarizes, died by bullets.
Why does the distinction matter? Because the trauma of direct killing worked destructively on the killers, to Himmler's great chagrin. They turned drunken, broke down or, worse in Himmler's view, came to enjoy killing rather than only tolerating it as a grim duty. The death camps with their gas chambers and crematoria made it possible for a few SS officers to direct large-scale killing with minimal contact with the victims; local conscripts, Russian prisoners of war and the Jews themselves suffered the burden of guarding, processing and mass murder. That is, the death camps evolved not to kill human beings more efficiently but to limit the trauma of the perpetrators.
In that regard the killings were not much different from the mass firebombings and atomic bombings from high altitude that Britain and the United States perpetrated upon enemy civilians in the course of the war. The Bloodlands of central Europe had their counterparts in the burned-out cities of Germany and Japan with their millions of dead. Almost 10 times as many died on all sides across those six terrible years as died in the Holocaust. It deserves its reputation as the horror of horrors, but there was more widespread horror as well. By including Soviet with German mass atrocities in his purview, Timothy Snyder begins the necessary but as yet still taboo examination of the full depravity of total war as it was practiced in the 20th century, before the advent of nuclear weapons foreclosed it. The next step, for someone brave enough, will be to examine and explain the mass atrocities of the victors.
Richard Rhodes is the author most recently of "The Twilight of the Bombs."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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