The Interpreter Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:
No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home.
One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today.
When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black.
Alice Kaplan's towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France's most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different.
Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person.
In Kaplan's hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.

The Interpreter by Alice Kaplan

From reader reviews:

Mary Thomas:

Inside other case, little men and women like to read book The Interpreter. You can choose the best book if you'd prefer reading a book. Provided that we know about how is important a new book The Interpreter. You can add information and of course you can around the world by way of a book. Absolutely right, because from book you can realize everything! From your country until finally foreign or abroad you can be known. About simple factor until wonderful thing you can know that. In this era, we can open a book or even searching by internet device. It is called e-book. You can utilize it when you feel bored stiff to go to the library. Let's go through.

Omar Hinojosa:

The book The Interpreter make you feel enjoy for your spare time. You may use to make your capable more increase. Book can to get your best friend when you getting anxiety or having big problem with your subject. If you can make reading a book The Interpreter being your habit, you can get considerably more advantages, like add your own capable, increase your knowledge about some or all subjects. You may know everything if you like available and read a publication The Interpreter. Kinds of book are a lot of. It means that, science guide or encyclopedia or other people. So , how do you think about this book?

Eugene Brown:

Do you one among people who can't read enjoyable if the sentence chained within the straightway, hold on guys this specific aren't like that. This The Interpreter book is readable simply by you who hate the perfect word style. You will find the info here are arrange for enjoyable examining experience without leaving perhaps decrease the knowledge that want to supply to you. The writer connected with The Interpreter content conveys thinking easily to understand by lots of people. The printed and e-book are not different in the information but it just different available as it. So , do you nonetheless thinking The Interpreter is not loveable to be your top list reading book?

Dorothy Vinson:

Are you kind of hectic person, only have 10 or perhaps 15 minute in your day to upgrading your mind expertise or thinking skill actually analytical thinking? Then you are having problem with the book when compared with can satisfy your short space of time to read it because all this time you only find publication that need more time to be go through. The Interpreter can be your answer because it can be read by an individual who have those short time problems.