David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, the recipient of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Chief, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians, and up until 2019 he served as the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center.
“Nasaw, who has written well-regarded biographies of Andrew
Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst, makes clear how much the
Allied forces wished that those in the displaced remnant would
simply go back to wherever it was they came from. (At one point,
Fiorello La Guardia tried to talk the Poles into it.) Nasaw also
captures the power of refusing to leave—the decision not to
disperse. This isn’t to say that the goal of the Last Million was
to stay in Germany forever. By not going through one door, they
were trying to open others. For the Jews, the main options were, as
Rosensaft laid them out, Palestine or some other place that had not
been the recent site of genocidal murder, and the central conflict
of ‘The Last Million’ is the fight, in the years following the war,
over which it was going to be…A great contribution of Nasaw’s book
is that it takes the cinematic moment in which American soldiers
arrive and pronounce the nightmare over—‘Shalom Aleichem, Yidden,
ihr zint frei,’ a Jewish chaplain from Brooklyn announced when he
drove into Buchenwald—as a starting point rather than a closing
scene.” —The New Yorker
“In The Last Million, Nasaw has done a real service in
resurrecting this history . . . Anyone who thinks
President Trump’s demonization of foreigners is an aberration
should read this history.” —Washington Post
“David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in 'The Last Million,' there
was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront
the true nature of the Holocaust…“The Last Million” describes in
meticulously researched detail what happened to the [displaced
persons] who felt—understandably enough—that they could not go back
to the lands of their birth.” —Wall Street Journal
“One of the many virtues of ‘The Last Million’ is the author’s
ability to make vivid sense of a bewildering moment. He clarifies
without oversimplifying…Nasaw demonstrates throughout an especially
supple sense of scale. Much of what makes the book so absorbing and
ultimately wrenching is his capacity to maneuver with skill between
the nitty-grittiest of diplomatic (and congressional, military,
personal) details and the so-called Big Picture. In cinematic
terms, he’s adroit at surveying a vast landscape with a soaring
crane shot, then zooming in sharply for a close-up of a single face
as it crumples... Nasaw takes pains to avoid facile
comparisons between the history he recounts and the current global
moment, with its — our — own seas of refugees. As his calmly
passionate book makes plain, however, one would need to be
willfully covering one’s eyes not to see how then bleeds into
now.” —Adina Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
“Insightful and eye-opening…Nasaw is a humane writer with a
knowledge of his subject that is broad and deep.” —Jim Zarroli,
NPR.org
“Based on an avalanche of research, sweeping, searching, and filled
with intimate details, The Last Million tells the enduringly
relevant and not well-known story of how political differences
between the United States and the United Kingdom, Cold War
calculations, ethnic and religious conflicts, and antisemitism
trumped humanitarian considerations, ‘turning what should have been
the primary mission upside down and victimizing those who had
suffered the most.’” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post
“Tells of the last million who had been confined to refugee camps
for five years....Through great research, Nasaw helps the reader
understand the complexity of permanently relocating refugees to a
new country.” —Seattle Times
“Nasaw, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, has once again produced
an extraordinarily well-researched book that is well worth
reading.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Nasaw does a masterful job of bringing to light the lasting
individual and global consequences of policies and attitudes
surrounding the last million… A thought-provoking, highly
recommended perspective on a complex and largely overlooked people
and period of modern history.” —Library Journal, starred review
“[Nasaw] provides a characteristically thorough and impressively
researched account of the roughly one million displaced persons who
found themselves stranded in Germany after the end of the war…While
delving into the weeds of political compromise and legislation,
Nasaw never loses sight of the hopes and struggles of the people at
the center…The Last Million showcases Nasaw’s deft handling of
complexity—not only the number of global controversies that the
Displaced Persons issue fed into, but the morally complex issues of
collaboration.” —Shelf Awareness
“A richly detailed account of what happened to the one million
Holocaust survivors, former slave laborers, and POWs who found
themselves in Germany at the end of WWII . . . Nasaw skillfully and
movingly relates a multilayered story with implications for
contemporary refugee crises. This meticulously researched history
is a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"[M]asterful...A searching, vigorously written history of an
unsettled time too little known to American readers." —Kirkus
Reviews, starred review
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