Ms. Paris writes with the immediacy of a novelist and the analytical qualities of a philosopher. She is clearly enormously intelligent, well-read, introspective, synthetic in the best sense, and probing. I would not call her analysis of the experiences of memory and history optimistic; on many levels, it is starkly cynical. I would call it fascinating and deep, not only from the many interviews she did but from the background research that informs them. Her treatments of Germany, Japan, South Africa, the United States, the Balkans, and the issues of UN tribunals and international criminal jurisprudence are balanced, percipient, and compelling. She is a voice for dogged determination in the process of incrementally improving our species and its approach to conflict, against the culture of silence and looking the other way, against atrocity with impunity. Read her. Find motivation in her stories. Then act as best you can to further a better and different world. Humanity is, and always will be, a work in progress. Ms. Paris contributes mightily to an appreciation of the costs, tradeoffs, and nuances that entails.

Erna Paris has done something very important: gone behind the scenes of the usual historical process, and met with people directly affected by the horrid events in Nazi Germany, Hirohito's Japan, apartheid-era South Africa, Vichy France and the disintegrated Yugoslavia. It's a personal history, but it works perfectly, because she asks the right questions and pursues the truth among the legends and fairy tales we have been told about these homicidal, genocidal regimes.

If you're fed up with the usual 'names and dates' types of history, and the 'just so' stories they convey, dig into this book. You're sure to be surprised at every turn. Seriously, you can't go wrong, if you're looking for an insight into how history is rewritten to fool us.

Having just caught the author on C-SPan2, I was motivated to comment on this very important book. Paris, a Canadian, has made a career out of examining, often with great inisght and sensitivity, the impact of tragic historical events on future generations within afflicted generations and she doles out her compassion equally to the children of victims as well as to the children of oppressors who seem to carry a blood-guilt down through the generations. Her specialty has been covering and analyzing the impact of WWII but this book covers that ground and more in the area of Slavery, Apartheid, The Rape of Nanking and more. Her conclusions are much what you'd expect but that's no reason to avoid this book. The strength in her writing is conveying a very personal involvement with her subjects, permitting us as readers to get to "know their pain" (to use an overemployed but apt phrase) and see all the survivors as human in their frailty and in their need to find some way to live with the past. She shows us that there is an entire range of coping mechanisms in dealing with atrocities from total official denial as in Japan to spasms of grief as in Germany. In between are nations just beginning to acknowledge their painful pasts and trying to find their own way of putting those memories to rest while still keeping the message of past lessons. She stresses the need for a system of Justice to bring out the truth or nontruth of events so that groups of people can know and accept the truth. I feel she makes an accurate case that where this no accounting, there is very little healing. I found most fascinating her description of her meeting with a Hiroshima survivor and what that revealed about a specific culture predicting how a nation might choose to react to discussions of the past. This is a fine effort and one worth handing to any Highschool age student who is far too young to have experienced any fallout from the tragedies discussed. In light of all the World War II Revivalism going on and with HBO's upcoming BAND OF BROTHERS dealing with the European theater, this work would make a nice supplemental reading requirement.

Ms. Paris is not a historian. She admits that primary sources are scarce. She has produced an "explanation" of how the Jews of Germany could have been taken in 500 years after the events decribed and how the "fear of the Other" continues today.

This is a hard read as she skips back and forth and from place to place. She details the pogroms but not the accomplishments of the Jewish community. She virtually ignores the events in the rest of Europe and cannot tell us why Spain was different from France or Italy.

I picked up this book when looking for something on Muslim/Christian relations in 15th century Spain.

Here is a summary of the book's theme: The Catholic church, in general, and the Spanish Catholic church, in particular, have been attempting to eradicate the Jews for the last 1400 years (at least). In the year 712, Muslims brought multi-culturalism to Spain. The resulting golden-age of tolerance was ended by Catholic bigotry, lies and murders. The book retells Spanish history in terms of crimes against the Spanish Jewish people (people who practiced the Jewish faith and those whose Spanish ancestors were Jewish but practiced Catholic Christianity themselves). Particular attention is given to the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and inquisition, but these events are linked to more contemporary Catholic crimes.

I found the details of Spanish history interesting. This period is particularly ugly to our modern sensibility and English speaking historians seem to avoid it. For example, Queen Isabella looks like a good candidate for modern feminist biography. She created one of the first modern states and financed the first European adventures in the Western Hemisphere. Despite this, the Amazon website has only 1 post-1950 biography on her. I suspect her role in establishing the Spanish inquisition seems decidedly un-feminist.

I don't recommend this book. The author naively accepts various first person accounts from the era when they support her case. At one point, she retells the miraculous story of Jewish children having visions of Christian crosses entirely without a modern skepticism. It simply happened. Less sentimental was her naive acceptance of the racist premise that being a 'converso' (Spanish Catholics with a Jewish ancestor) had some sort of biological reality. Somehow, the persecution of these Christians was a crime against the Jewish race because the biological reality of race was more important than the details of faith.

The conventional wisdom on the Spanish Inquisition, (see B. Netanyahu's "The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain") takes the view that the Spanish sovereigns let the 'coversos' be attacked in order to distract the outraged city masses and their leaders from turning against the royal establishment itself. In other words, it was a media campaign to control the 'masses' via propaganda. For example, King Ferdinand himself was a 'converso', but he continually used the inquisition to suppress opposition to his innovations in tax policy.

The 'revisionist' view (see The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by H.Kamen) suggests the modern understanding of the inquisition is Marxist propaganda of the 20th century. If you can take this perspective for a moment, the fact Paris ignores the 13th century expulsion of Jews from Muslim Spain suggests Paris fits Kamen's critique. For Paris, the only villain is the Catholic Church.

In The End of Days, Erna Paris's quest has taken her into the chronicles and archives of the "astonishing world" of the Moors in Spain - civilized, learned, tolerant - and its dynamic Jewish communities. Of the Holy Reconquest of Spain by Christian armies, of religious fanaticism, wholesale destruction of Jewish and Muslim monuments in an age of grisly plagues and pogroms. Paris is well-served by her material. And she has a powerful message. Our civility as a nation can be measured by our tolerance of minorities. Religious and racial intolerance violently transformed one of the richest pluralistic societies in Europe - Moorish Spain - into a society of savage conformism and fear at the brink of the modern age. That themes of this magnitude for our time arise from a retelling of event from 15th century Spain is a testimony of the powerful and fluent sweep of "The End of Days."