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World War II is often seen as the last “good war,” a clear-cut conflict between good and evil. And there was plenty of evil to go around, not just in the Axis forces. Take, for example, the case of Marcel Petiot.
Petiot, a French physician, was convicted of murdering 26 people in Paris during World War II. As David King explores in unprecedented detail in Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris, there were likely many more, perhaps up to 100. Petoit claimed he was a Resistance member who killed Germans and collaborators. Others, like the jury, said he used a phony escape network to lure people — and their money and valuables — into his deadly clutches.
 One thing is clear. Petoit took advantage of the horrors of the war. As King points out, when thousands of people are disappearing and dying, who will think the disappearance of a couple people they know is the work of a serial murderer? And what person of Jewish descent is going to approach authorities in Nazi-controlled France to report a missing relative? After all, 33,000 Jews alone disappeared in France an 11-week period after Nazis began a mass round-up of Jews in mid-July 1942, some 13,000 in Paris in just 48 hours.
Although Death in the City of Light has somewhat of a choppy feel, it is thoroughly researched and told. King doesn’t present it as some sort of mystery tale. The reader fairly well knows from the outset that Petiot is involved or responsible. A preface sets the stage with police fortuitously discovering dismembered body parts and bones, as well as bodies in a in a coal stove and lime pit, in property owned by Petoit. The balance of the book is given over to the ensuing investigation, the search for Petoit, and his trial. With the investigation as a framework, King explores Petoit’s background, including him becoming a physician after getting a 100 percent mental disability rating following his service in World War I and potential murders prior to the war, as well as life in Nazi-occupied France, Petoit’s scheme and some of his victims.
Police concluded that, acting under the pseudonym “Dr. Eugène,” Petoit claimed to be part of a network that could help people escape France to Argentina by way of Spain. Not only did they pay varying sums of money, they were instructed to arrive at their ultimate rendezvous in Paris with their most valuable possessions packed in no more than two suitcases or sewn into their clothes. Police would later discover 49 pieces of luggage Petoit hid containing hundreds of items — but no money or valuables. Petoit had also remodeled the property in which the human remains were found, including the construction of a small triangular room with solid brick walls about 8.5 inches thick containing only eight iron hooks a false door on the walls and a concealed peephole. Petoit’s escape network cover was good enough that he was actually arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo, although he was released after several months.
In contrast, Petoit claimed that as member of the resistance he headed up a cell of what he called the Fly-Tox network. The network’s main job, he said, was to track down and execute informers, although it also helped Frenchmen escape Paris. The method of finding these informers? Cell members would follow any civilian leaving Gestapo headquarters in Paris and, once in a secluded place, seize them with the Fly-Tox operative posing as a member of the German secret police. If the individual protested that he worked for the Germans, “he convicted himself,” Petoit told investigators. He claimed to have killed 63 “collabos” but that it was Fly-Tox’s escape operation that led to his arrest by the Gestapo. He said the bodies and remains police found in his building must have been dumped there while he was in Nazi custody.
The detail with which King explores the story is aided by the fact that not only did he have access to trial materials, including a stenographic record no one thought existed, but also the complete police dossier, which had been classified since the investigation began. The book struggles a bit because there were so many possibilities pursued during the investigation and, at times, the reader may become perhaps as befuddled as police were during the investigation. King also occasionally lapses into asides on what individuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Pablo Picasso were doing in Paris during this time. Although they add somewhat to setting the scene of Nazi-occupied Paris, their relationship to the story or its flow is inconsequential.
Death in the City of Light is a fair and in-depth examination of Petoit’s case. It also contains an intrinsic question of perspective. If the prosecutors were right, Petoit clearly was a serial killer. But if Petoit was killing people he believed to be informants, does the fact he did so in the course of a “good war” render him any less morally culpable?
If you start asking questions about everyone who dies, you’re going to be a very busy man.
David King, Death in the City of Light
Living on the Great Plains, we can tend to think we are removed from the nation’s ongoing debate over illegal immigration. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Just last year, Fremont, a town of some 25,000 in northeastern Nebraska, drew national attention when voters approved a law fining landlords and employers who house or hire illegal immigrants. (The law was suspended a month later pending a challenge to it in federal court.). In May 2008, authorities executed the largest immigration raid in the nation’s history and made 400 arrests at a meatpacking plan in Postville, a town of maybe 2,500 in northeastern Iowa. And less than six years before, northwestern Iowa was where an immigrant smuggling tragedy was discovered.
 On October 16, 2002, an employee of a now-defunct grain elevator in Denison, Iowa, (population 7,500 at the time) was checking the bays on grain hopper rail cars in preparation for loading. In one, he spotted what appeared to be two skulls. They were the first indication that the remains of 11 Central American and Mexican immigrants were in the hopper car, their bodies so badly decomposed they were in states of skeletonization and mummification. The story of what happened to those immigrants and how is the focus of a documentary and a book, Train To Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation.
The underlying story is almost as simple as it is sad. The 11 individuals, mostly from Central America, crossed into the United States in the hopes of finding jobs, some assisted by “coyotes” (smugglers). On June 15, 2002, they were among 26 illegal immigrants loaded into the bays of two grain hopper cars in Harlingen, Tex. The opening to the slope-floored bay in which these 11 ended up was locked from the outside. Although 15 immigrants in the other hopper were caught that night during a Border Patrol inspection, officials somehow missed this particular hopper. The train continued north. Trapped inside what one person described as essentially a humidor, the 11 died of dehydration and hyperthermia. The rail car sat in a facility near Oklahoma City for four months before being sent to Denison on October 15. The bodies were identified only through DNA tests.
Colleen Bradford Krantz, who wrote and co-produced the documentary, uses her journalistic background to take readers inside the tragedy. In her capable hands, Train to Nowhere explores not only the how and why of what happened but introduces the reader to some of the people who died and their families, details what must have happened in the rail car, follows the difficulty in the months-long effort to identify the victims, and examines the complexities of illegal immigration. This means the reader encounters and learns from the legal resident older brother of a young Guatemalan who died in the hopper car, a railroad conductor who sold information to one of the coyote networks, and the investigators on the case.
Using material gathered in creating the documentary, Krantz’s book, published by Ice Cube Press in Iowa, adheres to standards she acquired as a reporter for daily newspapers in St. Louis, Milwaukee and Des Moines. Unlike much so-called creative nonfiction today, Krantz is careful in documenting conversations. If she was not present and is relying on someone’s recollection of a conversation, any quotations appear in italics instead of quotation marks. This approach does not detract from the narrative or the flow. If anything, it may subtly enhance the book’s verisimilitude.
In examining the various aspects of this tragedy, Krantz shows both the personal toll and both sides of the immigration debate. Unfortunately, actually preventing or resolving these problems is beyond the scope of this or any book.
[To smugglers, a] person is nothing more than just a piece of meat.
Colleen Bradford Krantz, Train To Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation
So, if a lifelong pacifist liberal says a book about how to train our soldiers is a “must read,” it must be full of peacenik bullshit aimed at undermining the military, right? Believe me, though, when I say that’s not the case with Karl Marlantes’ What It Is Like to Go to War. Marlantes brings experience and knowledge to bear on something about which I know little to nothing. Yet I find the book so profound that I do call it a “must read,” an appellation that rarely passes my lips.
 The list of those who should be required to read the book is long: every decisionmaker and policymaker in the Department of Defense, every NCO and officer in the military, and every member of Congress. It better be on President’s Obama’s list of “books I read this summer.” What It Is Like to Go to War should be assigned reading at every military academy and in any fundamental leadership course for non-academy military training. In fact, it is a book that should be read by everyone who relies on the military. In other words, it should be read by all of us.
Marlantes combines personal experience, philosophy, history, mythology, ethics, psychology and spirituality in examining how we train our warriors. Marlantes has a range of ideas on how we can better prepare them for the jobs we assign them and, equally as important, to return home with the least damage to their psyche. Much of what he suggests comes from his own experiences as a combat Marine in Vietnam (some of which will be familiar to those who read his highly praised Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War) and as he tried to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder after the war. Even though that war was fought decades ago, Marlantes now has the benefit of perspective.
He argues persuasively that not only do today’s soliders face many of the same issues he did, the ability to kill remotely, and seemingly antiseptically, with drones, cruise missles and the like may raise other issues. Yet while recognizing modern warfare, What It Is Like to Go to War occasionally also looks to the past. Marlantes argues that some “primitive” societies better prepared their warriors for the toll combat takes on the body and the mind. Among other things, he suggests “rituals” to aid combat veterans, including some that would be performed immediately after a firefight. He also suggests that spiritual (not necessarily religious) guidance not only be part of military training, but available in the combat zone and afterward, particularly since our wars are fought by the young of society. At least from a layperson’s perspective, much of what the book suggests does not seem to be difficult to put into practice or disruptive of military training.
There is no question Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar, thought long and hard about the personal consequences of combat, how we prepare our soldiers for it and how to help them deal with it afterward. The book is stunning in the breadth of knowledge on which it draws yet is written to remain highly accessible. It is an important book, far too important to ignore.
When you are confronted with a seemingly painless moral choice, the odds are that you haven’t looked deeply enough.
Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like to Go to War
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In mass societies, myth takes the place of history.
William J. Bosenbrook, The German Mind
Glenn Kleier’s new novel, The Knowledge of Good and Evil, may confound a few readers. On the one hand, it is a novel of ideas, some rather esoteric. On the other hand, it is an action-based thriller. How a reader reacts may depend on which approach they prefer.
 The book is Kleier’s first since the top-notch The Last Day, published in 1997. Like its predecessor, The Knowledge of Good and Evil is framed around religious issues. Whereas The Last Day was a millennium-timed thriller looking at the end of the world, the focus here is on the end of life. More specifically, it centers around the existence of an afterlife and delves into core philosophical and theological issues, such as heaven and hell and good and evil.
Embarked on this intellectual exploration is Ian Baringer, a former Roman Catholic priest long troubled by the riddle of how God can allow evil in the world. Baringer also carries the psychological damage of losing both his parents, who gave their lives to save his in a tragic accident. Believing that Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton discovered a “backdoor to the Afterlife” just before his death, Baringer undergoes experimental procedures to induce near death experiences in the hopes of discovering and exploring the afterlife.
As seems de rigueur with religious/theological thrillers, there is an organization that believes Baringer’s experiments threaten the tenets of the church. Here, it is a sect formed in medieval times, Ordo Arma Christi (“The Order of the Weapon of Christ”). Highly reminiscent of but perhaps more ruthless than the Opus Dei villain in The Da Vinci Code, the sect’s members chase Baringer and his girlfriend around the world as Baringer seeks his answers and a long-missing manuscript of Merton’s he believes contains the secrets not only to the afterlife but issues of good and evil.
Yet just as the book is deep on ideas, it engages heavily in thriller motifs. Plenty of hair-raising escapes and cliffhanger chapter endings keep the story moving but perhaps too fast and with too many close calls. The action elements of the story seem at times in odd contrast to the extensively researched ideas it explores. It isn’t often that you find a thriller that explores the views of medieval and Renaissance artists on heaven and hell and contains a bibliography of works consulted in writing the book.
For people like me who prefer the ideas over action, the balance too often tips the wrong way and there’s a few too many last minute escapes from the clutches of Ordo Arma Christi. The organization’s minions include one who speaks like a Dracula imitation with words like “vhat,” “ve,” “vher,” and “vhy,” and we get heavy British and Irish accents, among others, several places in the story. The book may find more resonance among those who like a heavier dose of or adore the action novel. Regardless, Kleier has once again released a thought-provoking work, too often a rarity in today’s market.
All men know well the road to hell, none the way out.
Glenn Kleier, The Knowledge of Good and Evil
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