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The Bookseller by Mark Pryor – a book review

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Title:  The Bookseller

Author:  Mark Pryor

Publisher:  Seventh Street Books

Current Price:   £8.74 (PB)

ISBN:   9781616147082

The Bookseller

Link in Amazon:  The Bookseller

The Bookseller harks back to the days of crisis being low key, it brings in World War 2 and collaborators but only as an aside, almost as a ‘red herring’.

The main character, Hugo Marston, fulfils the general characteristics of the hard-baked ex-cop, with a broken marriage; but here it departs from that genre, and develops the character.  Yes, he is an ex-cop, but actually ex-FBI, now he is head of security at a US Embassy in Paris, speaks excellent French (something I have only just started to learn) and has a hobby of collecting books and visiting second-hand book shops and the booksellers in Paris, but in particular Max who is located about a quarter of a mile from Quai Saint Michel.  He has friends in these places and feels at a lost when one of them (Max) is hustled away under threat!

There are a couple of side streams developed along with the main one; that of securing the release of Max.  A mysterious feminine reporter, who has an equally mysterious past, and a policeman who seems to not want to do anything about the ‘kidnapping’ – indeed seems to be blocking anything from happening.

Hugo brings into use his contacts in the USA (Tom a spook for the CIA) and through a lot of misadventures and stumbling, not to say many side entries, the story comes to a resolvement.

However, the book is anything but predictable, and the many side trips, in conjunction, make for a very interesting, well written, and enticing book.

For me as a reader, I love a book which is subtle, one that does not throw guns at you at every corner, one that makes you think.  It reminds me of Conan Doyle’s stories, off John Creasey’s stories about the Toff, or even of John le Carré’s stories with George Smiley.

Mark Pryor has written  nine books with the main character of Hugo Marston, I will be looking to read the rest in the series in the coming year, I hope you will do so as well:

 

  1. The Bookseller(2012)
    2. The Crypt Thief (2013)
    3. The Blood Promise (2014)
    4. The Button Man (2014)
    5. The Reluctant Matador (2015)
    6. The Paris Librarian (2016)
    7. The Sorbonne Affair (2017)
    8. The Book Artist (2019)
    9. The French Widow (2020)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Silver Sword – Book Review

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The Silver Sword is a children’s book which is equally at home on an adult’s bookshelf. It is a story about family, about hardship, about war and its impact on the order of things. The Silver Sword is a novel by Ian Serraillier, a children’s classic, first published in the UK in 1956 by Jonathan Cape and then by Puffin Books in 1960

The Silver Sword

The story shows us a glimpse of human depravity, and of human goodness.

Re-reading this story after a gap of ovr 50 years, brought a new understanding. As an adult I now bring my own life experiences, but also a better understanding of a well-written story, but of equal importance is that of an understanding of history – in terms of my understanding of Nazi Germany, Western Germany after the war, but also of more recent history and the refugees who are trying to escape from the Middle East wars.

The journey undertaken by the Polish family named Brlick from Poland to Switzerland, the depths of despair, the hardships they face and the goodness they come across are just as liable to be applicable to those of the children we see in the camps in France, Italy, Cyprus etc.

The family ends up in four units; the father (Joseph) taken away to a forced labour camp for ‘re-education’, which is a joke gone wrong as he was a teacher who loved teaching and didn’t want to be curtailed by Nazi propaganda. The mother (Margret) was forceably taken away to work in Germany

We also then have the three children, Ruth of 18 years, Edek of 11 and Bronia 3 years old; the three children then spend the winter living in the cellar of a bombed house on the other side of Warsaw, and the summer living in woodlands outside the city

The father and mother gone, the children have to go on the run because Edek shoots and wounds a German soldier and the Germans thus take away their mother.

I don’t want to give more than this away except to bring into the story Jan, a young boy who has lost everything and everyone, and has learnt to survive on his own on the streets, and who befriends Joseph in his escape to Switzerland, which is where The Silver Sword comes in.

The Silver Sword Journeys

I highly recommend this story but also ask you to put it in context in relation to today’s refugee children. In 2015 it was estimated that there were more than 60 million displaced people in the world. This equated to nearly 1 in 100 people worldwide being displaced from their homes and in a lot of cases from their countries. Some areas have a higher rate than others; for example, more than one-in-twenty people living in the Middle East are displaced. Between 2008-2015, about 198,500 unaccompanied minors entered Europe seeking asylum – nearly half of which arrived in 2015 (FACTANK)

Unicef has stated that nearly half of all refugees are children. The following graph shows the breakdown

This is a global problem, which needs to be resolved by some joined up thinking and actions. Otherwise the story outlined in the Silver Sword will become the blue print (if it isn’t already) for the millions who have become without home. Kate Todd, The Guardian)

Further reading:

Wikipedia – The Silver Sword

Global Forced Displacement Reaches a New High

Global forced displacement hits record high

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The Lost Pink Triangles

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An exhibition of Nazi persecution of homosexuals goes on display in NYC.

BY JAMES MCDONALD
JULY 06 2015 5:00 AM ET
A traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945,” is now on view at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.
The show tells the story of Nazi persecution of homosexuals during World War II: Hitler’s genocide resulted in the death of 6 million Jews and millions of other people, with an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 sent to concentration camps because of their sexual orientations — the vast majority of them being gay men.
The story of these victims, commonly known as the Pink Triangles, has begun attracting attention relatively recently. Despite noted works like the play Bent, which was adapted into a film starring Clive Owen in 1997, and memoirs by former camp prisoners Gad Beck and Pierre Seel, gay stories have largely failed to become part of mainstream Holocaust narratives.
“The exhibition explores why homosexual behavior was identified as a danger to Nazi society and how the Nazi regime attempted to eliminate it,” says exhibition curator Edward Phillips.
“The Nazis believed it was possible to ‘cure’ homosexual behavior through labor and ‘re-education.’ ” Phillips says. “Their efforts to eradicate homosexuality left gay men subject to imprisonment, castration, institutionalization, and deportation to concentration camps.”
Between 1933 and 1945, more than 100,000 gay men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany’s ban on homosexuality. The exhibition includes personal accounts, photographs, and detailed information spanning this dark period of LGBT history.
MJHNYC.org, through October 2, 2015.

Tel Aviv's Gay Holocaust Victims Memorial Unveiled

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By ARON HELLER 01/10/14 11:49 AM ET EST AP
tel aviv gay holocaust memorial

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel’s cultural and financial capital unveiled a memorial Friday honoring gays and lesbians persecuted by the Nazis, the first specific recognition in Israel for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Tucked away in a Tel Aviv park, a concrete, triangle-shaped plaque details the plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people under Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. It resembles the pink triangles Nazis forced gays to wear in concentration camps during World War II and states in English, Hebrew and German: “In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The landmark joins similar memorials in Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco and Sydney dedicated to gay victims of the Holocaust. While Israel has scores of monuments for the genocide, the Tel Aviv memorial is the first that deals universally with Jewish and non-Jewish victims alike and highlights the Jewish state’s rise as one of the world’s most progressive countries for gay rights.
“I think in Israel today it is very important to show that a human being is a human being is a human being,” Mayor Ron Huldai said at the dedication ceremony, where a rainbow flag waved alongside Israel’s blue-and-white flag. “It shows that we are not only caring for ourselves but for everybody who suffered. These are our values — to see everyone as a human being.”
Israel was born out of the Holocaust and its 6 million Jewish victims remains seared in the country’s psyche. Israel holds an annual memorial day where sirens stop traffic across the nation, it sends soldiers and youth on trips to concentration camp sites and often cites the Holocaust as justification for an independent Jewish state so Jews will “never again” be defenseless.
But after 70 years, Tel Aviv councilman Eran Lev thought it was time to add a universal element to the commemoration. Lev is one of many gays elected to public office in Tel Aviv, a city with a vibrant gay scene that has emerged as a top international destination for gay tourism.
“The significance here is that we are recognizing that there were other victims of the Holocaust, not just Jews,” said Lev, who initiated the project during his brief term in office.
As part of their persecution of gays, the Nazis kept files on 100,000 people, mostly men. About 15,000 were sent to camps and at least half were killed. Other Nazi targets included communists, Slavs, gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Unlike their persecution of Jews, however, there was no grand Nazi plan to exterminate gays. Nazis viewed being gay as a “public health problem” since those German men did not produce children, said Deborah Dwork, director of the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

“The idea was to change their behavior, not to eradicate them, not to murder them,” Dwork said.
The policy was far from sweeping — as evidenced by the rampant homosexuality among the ranks of the Nazi Party’s SA paramilitary wing, which helped pave Hitler’s path to power. The most famous gay Nazi was Ernst Röhm, one of the most powerful men in the party before Hitler had him executed in 1934.
Later, the Nazis outlawed homosexuality and the Gestapo set up a special unit targeting homosexuality. In the Buchenwald concentration camp, the Nazis carried out experiments to try and “cure” homosexuality. Those sent to the camps were forced to wear pink triangles, compared to the yellow stars that Jews bore on their clothing. Gay Jews wore an emblem that combined the two colors.
Today, Israel is one of the world’s most progressive countries in terms of gay rights. Gays serve openly in Israel’s military and parliament. The Supreme Court grants a variety of family rights such as inheritance and survivors’ benefits. Gays, lesbians and a transsexual are among the country’s most popular musicians and actors.
Moshe Zimmermann, a professor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the memorial project’s historical adviser, said the Tel Aviv monument marked a big step in Israel by ridding itself from what he called a monopoly of victim hood.
“We are finally shedding the load of being the lone and ultimate victim,” he said. “We can learn from this that by recognizing the victimhood of others, it does not diminish the uniqueness of your own victim hood.”
 
Further reading:
 

  1. Original Article – Huffington Post
  2. BBC News Article
  3. BN&S Commentary
  4. The Gay Holocaust Lagers