I read this book just after reading Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich's book, The Inability to Mourn: Principles
of Collective Behavior and Randall L. Bytwerk's Julius Streichen : The Man Who Persuaded a Nation to Hate Jews . Long Shadows is much more eloquent than the other two but no less revealing about the difficulties that all nations have in facing the truth in the aftermath of such war-inspired atrocities. I recommend it to anyone who cares about history as a record of truth.

this book gives a feeling of the story it's telling. wonderfully put.

LONG SHADOWS is an eminently readable narrative of the conscious manipulation of history through the use and abuse of memory. It is thought provoking, provocative, and ultimately disturbing. Ms. Paris offers an account of societies' efforts to reshape their past, to encourage their citizens to adopt new attitudes towards that past, and of the public's resistance to that reshaping. She examines attempts to reinvent and cleanse the past in the US South over the issue of slavery and Civil Rights, in France over the Resistance and the issue of collaborators during the Second World War, and in the New South Africa as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission grapples with Apartheid. Erna Paris' prose style is immediate and very engaging. It is made even more compelling by her eyewitness accounts and interviews with those most affected by the reinvention of their past. There is much in this book to appeal to students of history, social history, and of human nature.