Word: mak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...week-you have a relationship with them," says creator Simon Fuller. "You don't know what's going to happen. Sanjaya walks out with his crazy hairdo. It's a living soap opera." Season 6 contestant Chris Sligh called the job of getting the audience to identify with you "mak[ing] David Hasselhoff cry," referring to the Baywatch star tearing up when Hicks won last year's crown. Which brings us to point...
...traveling companion, Mak cuts a charming figure. But his portrait of the last century is almost unremittingly dark. The mayor's scythe sweeps through the book as Mak tours Verdun, Guernica, Auschwitz, Stalingrad, Dresden, Chernobyl, Sarajevo. With an itinerary like that, there are predictably few joyful moments to be had. The book is filled instead with a sort of dreadful comedy that drove Samuel Beckett and others to see Europe as a theater of the absurd: the jaunty optimism of soldiers setting off to World War I (home by Christmas!), the apocalyptic hope of the survivors...
Harrowing stuff. But what is it for, all this looking back? No doubt, Mak's obsession with recollection is enhanced by another war raging in the Balkans in the late 1990s - a sharp retort to anyone who contends that Europe had put brutality and tribalism behind it. It was Dutch peacekeepers, after all, on whom fell the shame of Srebrenica, when they failed to prevent the massacre of 8,000 Bosnians at a U.N. safe area...
...March of the Treaty of Rome, it would also appear that the book is an attempt to inject a sense of urgency into the E.U. debate. It includes an epilogue added for the English translation that describes the votes against the E.U. constitution in France and the Netherlands. Mak ends, uncharacteristically, with an injunction: "Europe has only one chance to succeed...
Really? What is that one chance? He offers no specific vision, only this general yet urgent endorsement of unification. But the reader should forgive Mak this halfhearted attempt to pull a foreign-affairs moral from his history lesson. The book is not a call for unity, but a call for peace. It is a testament to Mak's warmth and skill as a writer that even in a chronicle of unrelenting barbarity he has portrayed a humanity worth saving...