The Interpreter

Draws on the account of World War II French political novelist and court interpreter Louis Guilloux, who witnessed general Patton's example-setting executions of seventy American troops, many of whom the interpreter believed were condemned because of their race. By the author of The Collaborator. 35,000 first printing.

Adult/High School-This elegantly written, solidly researched, articulate history is well suited for students who want to understand the tragedy of America's racial past. In the World War II European Theater, 55 of the 70 American servicemen executed for capital crimes were black-in an army less than 9 percent African American. This racial outrage is Kaplan's theme, and she presents the story through the diaries and novels of Louis Guilloux, a French writer and high intellectual who served as an interpreter for the U.S. army while it crossed France on the way to defeating the German army in its homeland. Guilloux wrote in his diary soon after the hanging of a black private first class (James Hendricks) for murdering a French farmer (the crime should have been deemed manslaughter, which did not demand execution) and attempting to rape the farmer's wife. Having witnessed racial bias in many trials, Guilloux contrasted Hendricks's inept defense with the polished one of a white captain (George Whittington) who murdered a French underground soldier, yet was acquitted. This moving account belongs in most collections.-Alan Gropman, National Defense University, Washington, DC
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Less than 9% of American soldiers in Europe during WWII were African-American, but 55 out of 70 soldiers executed for crimes against civilians were black. That's prima facie evidence of racial injustice, but in this absorbing study historian Kaplan (whose The Collaborator won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2001) digs beneath the statistics to explore how judicial bias operated on a practical level. She examines two court-martial cases held in France: James Hendricks, a black private hanged for killing a French farmer, and George Whittington, a white captain acquitted, on grounds of self-defense, of murdering a French commando. Both men apparently did kill their victims—and in Kaplan's view the incidents were the comparable doings of "two trigger-happy drunken soldiers"—but vastly different prejudices and privileges decided the defendants' fates. Hendricks was a truck driver in a segregated army who seemed, Kaplan contends, to embody his all-white jury's assumptions about black criminality, while Whittington was a well-connected officer and a decorated combat hero who was the picture of responsible white manhood. Kaplan supplements her own research with the perceptions of Louis Guilloux, a French intellectual who was an interpreter on both cases and wrote a novel about them. The result is a nuanced historical account that resonates with today's controversies over race and capital punishment (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.