... it is much more than a history of bureaucratic crime. Rather, Gretton has written himself deeply and intimately into the work, which also serves as a poignant memoir; a travelogue that leads the reader through time and space, history and memory; and an extended exercise in observation and introspection ... Perhaps the most urgent point that Gretton seeks to make, and the one that elevates his book from a work of history and memoir to a manifesto, is that the example of desk killers in the Holocaust must be seen as a moral caution against complacency and complicity in our own lives and our own times.
... an insightful and somewhat terrifying look into the corporate engines behind several of the most significant atrocities of the 20th century ... You would think Gretton’s interlacing of his own story with those of these killers would detract from the intensity of the larger tale, but it does not. Rather, it enhances the commonplaceness of it all. You are carried along by the author in his wanderings and relations, as well as in his litany of terrors. The simplicity of his journey makes starker the choices the desk killers made. If there is one question nagging this daunting work, it is this: Who will take the time to read this impressive book of nightmares? This is only volume one, after all. Gretton has another massive opus ready to go.
... a complex and exceptional book ... very well written and extraordinarily powerful ... often narrated in the first person and richly illustrated with his own photographs, maps, diagrams or facsimile documents. They all feed into an autobiographical travelogue but also a formal examination of Western moral history ... Be warned, the book requires a strong stomach ... Part of the achievement of his book is to abolish any sense of moral exceptionalism about Nazi atrocities and to demonstrate how Treblinka takes its place in a web of cause and effect that links to both Germany’s past but also to a much wider European contemporary commercial landscape ... Dan Gretton’s profound moral effort in this book is...a guarantee that the truth will be heard.
The book is a journey in multiple respects: through landscapes and cityscapes to reimagine sites of terror or tumult; an immersion into human nature, including the mutation of memory; and of self-discovery. The jumbled but extraordinary result leads to an understanding of harrowing, often hidden histories, and a reframing of how we think about the past ... Within the kaleidoscope of history, psychology, ideologies, literary extracts and personal reflections, I You We Them crystallises two epiphanies. The most challenging is its demand for personal introspection. 'What would I do?' it asks, if required to perform tiny, seemingly innocuous tasks, within a larger scheme with devastating consequences. The most upsetting is a realisation that, by deliberately choosing ignorance or a shade of obliviousness, we allow even mass killings of fellow human beings to sneak under our radars despite being perpetrated in plain sight.
Gretton is doing something more generous and more complex than simply chronicling the noxious anonymity of desk-killers—more generous, more complex, and therefore necessarily more daring, more open to looking either distracted or self-indulgent or both ... I You We Them carefully uses this tension between the personal and the historical in order to ratchet up the fascination along these two axes. Half the book is both an unsettling historical inquiry and, by not very subtle implication, a warning, a potential indictment of every single person who reads it and who might some day, under pressure, stamp a lethal memo that crosses their desk. And the other half of the book is the oddly engrossing personal story of the man doing the inquiring. The result is completely, confidently fascinating and naturally sets the imagination wondering about what Volume 2 will be like.
Gretton’s is manifestly not a conventional history ... Some may weary of Gretton’s reflections on his Suffolk childhood, his Cambridge University years and love of swimming ... It is not always clear how these excursions serve the book’s exploration of 'white collar' killers and their enormities, though one should applaud the experiment ... The book is powerfully influenced by the Italian Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s reflections on human cruelty, and by Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour film Shoah. It makes significant demands on the reader’s time, patience and, one might add, wrists (the hardback is heavier than a housebrick). It is worth persevering, though, as the writing has the power at times to mesmerise.
Gretton, an activist and educator, takes a deeply personal approach to this book. This is in clear contrast to the ways that the mass murderers he writes about use abstract language to dehumanize their victims. Gretton's autobiographical asides are often lengthy digressions, but they have the effect of making him an empathetic guide through difficult histories ... Readers looking for a traditional history will not find it here. This account is recommended for readers who have the patience to accompany the author on his journey of discovery to understand the motivations behind people who commit mass atrocities.
... sprawling and meditative ... Full of long digressions—nature walks, family history—and rumination, this baggy work is sometimes overwrought in comparing modern corporate executives and Nazis ... Still, Gretton offers a lucid, powerfully written indictment of historical outrages, posing painful moral questions that remain relevant today.
A massively detailed account of the good bureaucrats who follow orders and thereby kill millions ... too long by half and wildly diffuse, with digressions into philosophy, the psychology of storytelling, and the like. However, the subject is tremendously important in a time grown ever darker—and ever more reminiscent of the darkest days in modern world history. For philosophically inclined—and patient—readers with a bent for resisting institutional evil.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
