read Ziegler's others book.

The bitter response of the Swiss to this book, as represented by a couple of the reviewers, reminds me of the delusional angry responses of Jews everywhere when it has been proven that the USS Liberty, flying the American flag, was deliberately attacked by Israeli air and sea forces with the intent of sinking it and killing every American on board and then blaming it on the Arabs. [It did occur to me that this book might be financed by the World Jewish Congress, for it does an incredibly good job of softening up the Swiss banks for larger faster settlements and the reduction of the obstacles they have been placing in the way of the holocaust heirs.]

This is a good book, with good notes and a good index, and there is no denying the power of its retrospective examination of Swiss misbehavior.

Three aspects of this book stood out for me:

1) The glorification of secrecy as an end in itself, justifying almost any position--in substituting secrecy for morality the Swiss have aided and abetted war crimes, not just by the Nazis, but by many other evil people and organizations.

2) The lesser known aspect of Swiss misbehavior in rejecting hundreds of thousands of refugees, condemning them to certain death, while also bank-rolling and arming Hitler, essentially rescuing Germany from certain defeat in the early days, while prolonging the war toward the end.

3) The fact that today Switzerland continues to be the financial haven of choice for dictators and genocidal war-mongers of all sorts.

I happen to like Switzerland and admire the Swiss, but this book is a good spanking and it will be a test of their character as well as their "situational awareness" to see if in the aftermath of 9-11 they recognize the possibility that some forms of money should not be laundered, some forms of client should not be served--as one famous plastic surgeon once said, "you make your money on the ones you do, you make your reputation on the ones you do not."

"Black Intellectuals" is a mixed bag: Banks doesn't so much "chart the contours" of African-American thought as merely hit many of its high spots; the book is too much a history of black intellectuals and not enough of black intellectualism. And even nonscholars will notice curious omissions and oversights. Despite its flaws, though, "Black Intellectuals" is valuable -- it tells the rarely heard story of black thinkers overcoming almost insurmountable barriers: first slavery, then no education, then inferior, segregated education, then discrimination in supposedly open education, and finally -- in only the last couple of decades -- actual equal access to top schools. Though Banks doesn't overdramatize and refuses to clutter his analysis with unnecessary rhetoric, the book leaves you wondering how any African-American prior to the civil rights movement managed to procure an education and an academic job. Discrimination against intellectuals funneled learned blacks into teaching and the ministry, Banks writes; at the turn of the century, more than half of black college graduates were working as teachers. But even the education establishment narrowly restricted blacks' prospects: "The white academic world was as inhospitable ! to blacks as were all other sectors of American life." Black colleges were substandard, expecting little from students and faculty and delivering less.

Shut out from white intellectual circles, 19th-century black thinkers held conventions, painstakingly crafting statements and resolutions that they realized would be ignored by state and federal authorities. Even in the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, black writers and artists found themselves hampered by the particular agendas and interests of the well-meaning white patrons whose financial support was crucial. Banks describes how writers like Zora Neale Hurston were compelled by patrons to turn their work in uncomfortable directions.

Sometimes, though, black thinkers made questionable moves all by themselves, and Banks creditably humanizes his subjects by noting contemporaneous criticism of them and pointing out their suspect opinions and actions: Frederick Douglass disparaging black women writers; Booker T. Washington using political clout to "squelch black papers that crossed him"; Langston Hughes disavowing his leftist poetry before the House Un-American Affairs Committee. And Banks describes how, when the media trained attention on black militants in the late 1960s, many self-appointed authorities fell short: "By virtue of their race, not their training or interests, all black intellectuals were considered experts on race and the meaning of the black movement. . . . Quite a few dubious intellectual pronouncements flowed as black sociologists analyzed literary texts and black psychologists explained economic history."

By exploring the full range of African-American ideas (including, strikingly, dissenters like the 19th-century blacks who "resisted the principle of separate institutions and insisted that the public schools be integrated"), Banks places thoughts and thinkers in the context of history's vagaries. It's frustrating, then, that "Black Intellectuals" doesn't follow through on this well-rounded promise. In profiling and! highlighting a plethora of thinkers, Banks tends toward shallowness: He fails to draw black intellectual history in broad strokes, making connections between thinkers and thoughts; since he summarizes thinkers' views in a couple of sentences -- and doesn't tend to set those views in a continuum -- it's difficult to recall who thought what, and what difference it made.

He notes scholars' positions on political topics without actually exploring the topics and weighing the various positions taken. And he's scrupulously nonpartisan with regard to those topics; he gives dissenters equal space, muddying his goal of explaining how currents of thought developed. And there are numerous small omissions and overlookings that leave misleading impressions. There's a photo of author Alex Haley and a passing reference to his "Autobiography of Malcolm X" but no note of his groundbreaking "Roots" (and, therefore, no mention of his plagiarism). Bizarrely, the word "Afrocentrism," the wishful-thinking belief system that has proved unfortunately popular among black intellectuals as well as solace-seeking masses, doesn't appear until the book's appendix. And the appendix itself is odd: 54 pages of "selected biographies," solo paragraphs on each of dozens of writers, activists and other figures, from Benjamin Banneker to Spike Lee to Richard Wright. They are generally too selective and sketchy to be of much use, giving more space to college graduation dates than to ideas and achievements. And many choices are strange: James Baldwin's bio dubs the novelist/essayist "a sensitive boy" but fails to note his homosexuality.

While sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois is the book's key figure, Banks devotes but a handful of sentences to his 1903 book "Souls of Black Folk," still the single most important work of African-American thought. More significantly, Banks dramatically underplays the classic protest-vs.-accomodation philosophical struggle between Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, which today's writers on race -- from Cor! nel West to the odious Dinesh D'Souza -- use to explain the intellectual paths that civil-rights activists have chosen and the arguments they have wielded. The Du Bois-Washington debate, still salient and alive today, provides a useful lens through which to view 20th-century race thinking; without it, Banks leaves the reader viewing black intellectuals somewhat, well, myopically.

Banks' text revealed itself to be moderately distinct from what I anticipated. He deals less with specific ideologies than with the chronology of people and their promulgated ideas. One particularly interesting sidelight related to the constraints on the Black Intellectual, until very recently, who elected to think "outside the box." In fact, vestigial reluctance by peers to acknowledge the contributions of individuals who give contemplation to subject matter outside the limits of Afrocentric or ethnic concerns still exists.

In sum, BLACK INTELLECTUALS is an indispensible overview, but definitely only a starting point for this area of investigation. The book is a commendable effort to consolidate referent material in convenient volume. It documents many of the pertinent parties but is admittedly not an attempt to be all-inclusive. What it does accomplish is immutable validation of the vast contributions of Blacks and specifically, Black Americans to every facet of art, literature, science and philosophy, in spite of the obstacles placed before them throughout the history of this country.

The other critics on this page, it seems, have either not read the book, are talking about another book, or believe that the Vatican is mankinds sole connection to God or whatever and can do no wrong.

The critics charge that the Vatican was pro-communist is ludicrous. Communist persecution of Catholics behind the Iron curtain was a principle motivation for the Vatican to protect ex-Nazis. See, the Nazis hated the Communists as well. The vatican and the Pope desperately wanted to stop the eastward expansion of the communists. So they turned to ex-Nazi leaders (who still had connections, military equipment and money) for help. That is a key part of the story (theres more to it, though).

Even so, the Vatican was not a monolithic entity. There were elements within the church that hated the Nazis, and elements that supported them (most notably the Catholic priests connected to the Pavelic regime). Like any large organization, different people had different opinions. But the evidence is very strong that the highest levels of the Vatican supported helping ex-Nazis. US intelligence infiltrated the Vatican and reported that known war criminals were hiding in the vatican, where they had diplomatic immunity.

I would not give the book 5 stars, however, because it is not well organized. Some of the writing is confusing. The information is extremely somplex, since it relates many events involving different people at different places. Its a very complicated story thats difficult to tell.

One mor thing: if the Vatican is so virtuous and infalliable, then why are they still refusing to reveal what they know about the 'Ratlines'? Why are they refusing to provide public access to their internal documents of the period? Methinks they have something to hide.

So buy this book. It is a revealing story about power politics behind-the-scenes. To simply deny the evidence is naive.

Using previously classified government documents, the authors give the most detailed account in print of the Catholic Church's collaboration in the smuggling of Fascist and Nazi war criminals out of Europe at the end of the Second World War. Officials at the Vatican who helped these men get false papers and safe passage included then Monsignor Montini (later Paul VI) and Bishop Hudal, author of the clero-fascist Foundations of National Socialism. Among those who thus escaped justice, at least temporarily, were Adolph Eichmann, chief administrator of the holocaust, Walter Rauff, director of the mobile gas truck extermination program, Franz Strangel, Commandant at Treblinka, and Ante Pavelic, fascist Croatian dictator. Many other ex-Nazis were recruited by the church to become "freedom fighters" against the Eastern bloc. Aarons and Loftus argue Vatican's primary motivation throughout this operation was an anti-communism so fanatical that it knew no moral limits. The second half of the book recounts how the church's smuggling operation was infiltrated and turned against the West by the Soviet Union. Although the authors' analysis of the motivations and culpability some of the figures involved can be questioned (most notably their exoneration of Pius XII on charges of complicity with the Nazis in the rise of fascism), this book remains a remarkable history of a little known dark chapter in modern church history.

In their introduction to the new edition, Loftus and Aarons detail how some of their original investigative work led to the capture and arrest of Erich Priebke, the SS officer who directed the infamous massacre at the Ardeantine Caves near Rome. Priebke had escaped through the Vatican Ratlines to Argentina and was sheltered by the church even during his 1997-1998 trials. The authors also point out some of the connections between their investigations and the ongoing highly-publicized attempts to trace the Nazi gold held in Swiss banks. More detail on this is given in their revised conclusion (ch 13) in which they suggest that financial motives may have been as important a motive in the Vatican's decision to establish the Ratlines as anti-communism. The Vatican invested the $29 million cash settlement that it received from Mussolini as part of the deal for the Concordat in Germany. During the 1930s, it attempted to protect that growing investment against the looming international conflict by setting up a money laundering scheme which involved secret exchange protocols between the Vatican Bank and banks in Switzerland. Recognising this, the authors have moved fairly far away from the conclusion of their original edition that the Vatican was not involved on the build up of fascism in Germany. In fact they now even cite a passage from La Popessa which claims that Pacelli (later Pius XII) gave money to Hitler in 1919 to suggest early links between the Nazis and the Vatican.

On the one hand, the mystery is well constructed and its investigation, including the slow piecing together of disparate pieces of information to create a sensible whole is excellent.

On the other, the story is related in such a clinical and passionless fashion that it fails to excite the interest of the reader, if appealing to the intellect.

Probably on par with some of the lower-average Holmes stories from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I wasted my time reading about lies.