Andrea Pitzer

the first half of this was kind of hard for me and i found my mind wandering a lot. it got much more interesting at the end, when the crew had gotten trapped and had to both survive and get home (sorry crew, but it was so much more engaging). for me what was the takeaway is the disappointing reminder of how much we such as humans. for these dutchmen, who were wholly unprepared for arctic weather, to arrive and immediately condemn the native population as barbarian and subhuman, because show more they're dressed differently than the dutchmen (they're dressed to live and survive in the arctic), when they live there, ugh it's just our legacy i guess. we did it then (this was in the 1590s) and we do it now. and for their first instincts, when they see the natives and when they see the animals they've never seen before (polar bears, walrus) was to capture or kill them, and these are (theoretically) explorers. i know that most of them were actually just sailors, just men who didn't have what i'd assume would be the explorer's sensibility of wanting to learn and wanting to understand and wanting to see possibilities, but to not want to observe the animals, to just want to kill them - i think our human instincts are going to be our demise. show less

In 1584, Dutch navigator William Barents "prepared to sail off the edge of the known world." Many looked for a shortcut to China to the West, but the Dutch sought the solution to the North. The belief was that there was a direct, open polar sea. The fleet makes its first voyage from Amsterdam to Kildin Island, then to the northern tip of Nova Zembla, aptly named Ice Point. The Sami and Russian trappers disappear into the darkness of the far north. They encounter massive glaciers, and winds show more that surge the ship. At one point an anchor snapped free and one of the ships "ricocheted" but all survived. They are forced to turn back after reaching impassable ice walls.

In 1595, the Dutch burghers authorized a second voyage, one that would go via the southern tip of Nova Zembla. 6 ships, with William in "The Greyhound" joined by Admiral Nay. They are forced to turn back after 4 drown in a ship collision during a storm, 2 are eaten by a polar bear and more ice. Barents last voyage was in 1596, along with former representative Jan Cornelis Rjip, now fellow captain. Upon reaching Spitsbergen Island, Rjip and Barents would separate, Barents heading back to Nova Zembla, and it would be the last time they ever spoke...

"Icebound" is harrowing and Barents didn't have the macho foolishness of a Magellan or conquistador type. But I couldn't give it a 5, because narratively, it could've been more engaging at times and I think adding more personal details about the crew, including Barents, could've helped. These men were smarter and more conscientious with their supplies. They do their best to stay warm, but also clean and preserve their little energy for emptying fox traps, take turns collecting wood and moving supplies. But despite that, the last voyage is one of the wildest I've ever read and was definitely the best part of the book! show less

This is an engrossing and important book. Journalist Andrea Pitzer has written a story of concentration camps from their origins at the very end of the 19th century through the beginnings of the 21st. Only the Nazis had technological death factories bent on genocide, but extrajudicial mass detention of civilians in the modern sense started in Cuba shortly before the Spanish-American war and was indeed one of the justifications for it -- the sinking of the Maine was the spark but the horrors show more of the camps for "reconcentración" provided much of the moral force. And yet, though we ostensibly opposed the camps, the idea was so useful that we had our own camps in the Philippines before you could blink.

Pitzer traces the idea and the institution from its origins through colonialist wars in Africa, enemy alien camps in the two world wars, the horrors of the Nazi camps, America's Japanese internment camps, the gulags, Asian communist reeducation camps, repression of African freedom movements, anticommunist repression in South America, and finally Guantánamo and the other camps of the US "war on terror". She catalogs the gradations and varieties -- simple detention, starvation, disease, torture, labor camps, and extermination camps. Each chapter covers another place, time, and stage in the development of camps. In most chapters, she weaves information from the experiences of one or a few individual camp survivors with the larger sweep of historical information. Some of the events she covers I knew about in detail -- there was relatively little new to me in the chapter on the Nazi camps -- but others I knew only as phrases (the Mau Mau rebellion, for instance), or not at all. It's all riveting and important and the news sounds very different to me now that I have read it.

Highly recommended. show less

In the end, this was a much better book than I thought it would be when I started out. The publisher's hype about it was a bit too strong and sensational. No, the author does not write prose to match Nabokov's, and no , her new insights are not totally earth shaking.

That said, it's a pretty fascinating look at how Nabokov worked into his novels a reaction against the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, from the Russian revolution to concentration camps, to the Nazi holocaust. And show more he did it in some very surprising and strong ways. She finds and explores them, and follows the leads even where they are pretty buried.

The book hinges around Nabokov's biography: the assassination of his father not long after the revolution, the deaths of many relatives (including his brother, whose homosexuality bothered Vladimir quite a bit), and the repeated necessity of him and his wife to escape various countries during the rise of the Nazis. She finds political references, maybe surprisingly, in many of his works, and her discussion of them in Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire are especially well-done.

I need to go back to these novels; it's been many years since I've read them. While Pitzer is no Bryan Boyd, she's an able writer, and for literateurs interested in one of the finest writers of the 20th century, this is, surprisingly, a must read. show less