cover image Europeans

Europeans

Jane Kramer. Farrar Straus Giroux, $23.95 (576pp) ISBN 978-0-374-14939-0

In this collection of 30 of her ``Letter from Europe'' pieces for the New Yorker , Kramer shines as a writer who refuses to oversimplify the complexity of people and events. She notes that Kurt Waldheim consigned to death Serbian partisans and Greek Jews with equal zeal, then goes on to consider how this bureaucrat dressed himself in patriot's clothes and seduced an Austria that wants to believe in him. Kramer can be deceptively casual. Her travel piece on Hamburg broadens into an analysis of Germany confronting its national conscience. Her account of the Paribas bank scandal involving secret Swiss accounts probes French attitudes toward cheating and state authority. Whether she is writing about a Paris-based rock musician from Cameroon, her Portuguese concierge, a Milanese psychoanalyst-cum-con artist, French anti-heroic novelist Emmanuel Bove or a German town's resistance to U.S. nuclear weapons, she has an eye for the telling detail that reveals character. Kramer is an essential guide to the contemporary European scene. (Nov.)