Friedman presents an engaging introduction to the history of US law about dead hands and cold cash, including trusts, will contests, perpetuities, charitable gifts and foundations, and of course death and taxes. It is a work in the style of his American Law in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2002): a clear exposition of key principles and landmarks, with an emphasis on accessibility (good undergrad fodder) rather than depth.
Norwood is more controversial, judging by the reviews, and from an initial trawl appears to be condemning institutions, academics and third parties for what may often have been a profound lack of imagination or indifference rather than deep partisanship with the Nazi regime and the academic enthusiasts in Germany. I suspect that much of the time, prior to 1941, the institutional stance was 'business as usual' and 'we are above politics' or 'can ameliorate those few exceptional abuses', the same stance evident in relations between Australian universities and autocracies such as the People's Republic of China. Twas ever thus?
The book offers a sidelight on Jeff Sparrow's Communism: A Love Story ( Melbourne University Pres,s 2007), which despite its title is a biography of Guido Baracchi, the communist intellectual, journalist, playboy, and friend of Lesbia Harford and Katherine Susannah Prichard. He was once described as "Melbourne's Lenin". Unlike Vladimir L he was interested in art, good food, wine and - more importantly - didn't engage in the murder of very large numbers of people.
I was going to say "the famous Guido Baracchi" but after sitting in on a journalism tute last night where undergrads were deliciously unaware of Watergate, Richard Nixon or Gough Whitlam I'm wary about assumptions regarding collective memory.
A salient moment in the biography is the account ("there aren't any happy endings here") of emigres to the people's paradise encountering the realities of repression, picked off one by one in an atmosphere of indifference or even celebration on the part of the true believers.
The OGPU arrested Rose [Cohen's] husband Max in March 1937. Suddenly tainted, she waited alone for months. No one wrote. No one rang. No one visited. In August, after five unbearable months, the soldiers came and took Rose away. ... [British Communist Party leader] Harry Pollitt, who had proposed marriage to Rose many times, arrived in Moscow on the day of her arrest. He raised her case with senior officials, including, according to one source, Stalin himself. But when he returned to London, Pollitt and his comrades not only refused to call publicly for Rose's release, they also actively sabotaged the efforts of non-communists on her behalf. ... On 28 November, the guards dragged Rose into the cellars of the Lubianka prison and shot her once in the back of the head.
... The CC member Steve Purdy had shared a room with a German communist who disappeared in the purges. When Purdy arrived back in Australia, he ran from the friends who greeted his ship, screaming: 'Don't let them get me!'
Audrey Blake, the jazz-loving free-thinker Guido knew from the early days of FOSU, spent 1937 in Moscow's Hotel Lux. She watched guests slowly vanish around her, with no particular concern. 'As the slushy autumn gave way to the beautiful, white winter', she later wrote, 'our corridor became strangely deserted and the lead seal would appear outside another apartment. But we didn't see anyone 'taken'. We never heard anything untoward .. The black side of existing socialism was a closed book, and those who talked about it were 'agents of the imperialists'.'
