James M. Deem

Hold on to your stomachs! There are some real graphic photos of some old bodies. The book is set up in chapters that address different locations around the world where previous civilizations have existed. The one I definitely found the most interesting was the chapter about the children of the andes. I have actually been to the museum in Arequipa, Peru where you can see several of the children that scientists have uncovered on the tops of the massive andes mountains. Unfortunately, the show more translations of explanations in the museum were not fabulous so it was great to get more information about these young people. It is wild to hear about the explorations as well -- the lengths that people put themselves through to further out intake of information. There is also and end section talking about why glaciers are melting and what it means for us, along with notes on how to help the environment. That creates this nice balance of: yes it is fascinating and illuminating to find these bodies and be able to process them but its not actually a very good thing that we are finding them. Also love the "Glaciers to Visit" section... who knows how long they'll be around realistically. While in Peru, I visited a shrinking glacier in a small valley. It was a national park that predicted the glacier would be entirely melted in the next 14 years which would lead to the end of the valley's water source and the area would become a desert. The park claimed it was home to 16 species of plants and animals that existed only within the park and would thus become extinct when the glacier fully melted. Hard to hear things like that. show less

James Deem's The Prisoners of Breendonk is not what one would call an enjoyable read. This historical document draws upon a wealth of primary and secondary sources to paint a bleak, sometimes hopeless portrait of human cruelty in a Belgian concentration camp during WWII. Deem, a practiced author and retired college professor, extensively researched this lesser known facility, which is generally left out of discussions including the likes of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The complex was small, show more yes, but its legacy stands as a testament to the depths of sadism and indifference which people can reach when backed my oppressive, nationalist, militarist, racist power structures. The book takes the reader through a history of the names, faces, and words of many of those who spent time in (and often died in) Breendonk. While the author does admit to some guessing of particulars for individual prisoners where direct citation were not available, he points to their shared experience enough to justify these extrapolations (3). With that being said, The Prisoners of Breendonk is a fascinating, horrifying in depth look at the rise and fall of this brutal Belgian concentration camp.

In keeping with the deadly serious topic being covered, Deem keeps to a mostly neutral tone throughout the book. This tone holds even when talking about gross human rights violations and occurrences such as murdered prisoners' causes of death being falsified on official documents to cover up the abuses taking place in the camp (79-80). More vivid and figurative language is primarily reserved for direct quotations taken from primary sources - such as the arrival of prisoners being characterized as being “vomited” from the vehicles delivering them to the camp (13) or when an overseer sneers, “A bullet costs too much for you; my fists cost nothing” before beating a prisoner to death (196). The stark contrast between the fairly monotonous prose and the shocking quotations lends some life to what sometimes comes across as an extremely heavy, even cumbersome, literary journey. Deem's writing isn't bad (far from it), but the gloomy, violent, unrelenting nature of the subject matter left me in need of something less depressing every time I sat the book down. I suppose, however, that this is the point, and that it would be rather troubling to not feel a bit downtrodden after reading a work like this.

The book is organized pretty much chronologically, starting with the camp's early use as a fort then moving to its designation as a “reception” camp under the Nazi regime, and ending with the closing of the camp. It makes sense to organize this way, as it seems the author was trying to fit as much information and human experience as possible into a fairly compact space. The end result feels a little cluttered at times, and, in chapters heavy with individual stories which amounted to brief snippets about each person and archival photos I felt almost like I was looking at a long line of people with whom I could never really relate (34-41). (Admittedly, this copy is an advanced copy, and the final , published work will likely have a more polished appearance, and many of the photos will likely be better positioned and colorized.) Possibly the single most interesting and humanizing features found in the pages of The Prisoners of Breendonk are copies of the original sketches by a Mr Jacques Ochs, who was assigned to draw many of the prisoners by order of the camp's commanding officer. These images run the gamut from realistic and saddening to arguably racist – showing a possible anti-Semitic slant which many of the non-Jewish prisoners shared (69). Ochs' drawings speak, in a surprisingly real way, both to the suffering faced by the prisoners at Breendonk and the prejudice at the core of so much of the suffering visited upon the Jewish people during WWII.

On the whole, this book was an amazing educational read. Though it felt bogged down, sometimes, by the neutral tone and morose subject matter, the work speaks, in a real way, to human depravity and perseverance. This book would be an excellent work to cover, at least in part, in a high school world history class during a WWII unit, and I will likely pick up a copy when it becomes commercially available. Furthermore, the topic itself, Breendonk, is often passed over in surveys of WWII, and the UNO Education library doesn't seem to have a single other book on this camp (though books on other concentration camps abound. I would highly recommend this work be included, when available. show less

This book is a really coll and graphic exploration of people who used to walk across North America, and the facial reconstruction that scientists can now do from skulls and bone samples to figure out what they might have looked like. The illustrations are incredible and the historical significance of why it's important to do this type of science is thoroughly explained through a lot of text. The sometimes dry technical terms used to describe the construction process takes away from the kind show more of gross appearance of the skulls and half-finished human faces being created and displayed. I love anatomy and this kind of book is the type I would share with a science class of older students for sure because I think it's fascinating and could spur really interesting discussions. show less

Books concerning the famous Pompeiian disaster usually fall into two categories: stories and interpretations of how everyoe died, and explanations of what happened on the day of the eruption. This book does have a brief description of that day in its first chapter, but it is primarily concerned with the excavation and history of the archeological dig that has been ongoing at the site for a very long time. It spends a great deal of time explaining how archaeologists have come to learn what show more they have through their excavations. It goes into detail on how the available literature and the evidence dug up help construct a timeline for the deaths they found. Most importantly, the book explains the most famous part of the excavation, the plaster casts of the dead. These molds act as a type of fossil, allowing researchers to see exavtly what kinds of people had lived there, and understand what their final moments may have been like. The author has written many other non-fiction stories for children, and his experiene comes through in his simple but engaging narrative. The pictures are a bit disturbing for younger readers, but knowingthat the book is about death ought to be enough to prepare any reader in the target range, likely 3-6th grade. show less