Reviewed by Chris Boyd
 
August 27, 2005
 
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future. Stephen Ambrose, Fast Company
 
It's more than 30 years since Jacob Bronowski stood ankle-deep in the sludge at Auschwitz in his plain dark suit; his leather shoes still on; his wire-frame spectacles glinting at the television camera in the watery grey light.
 
It's more than half the gap between World War II and today since the Polish physicist-philosopher went down on his haunches and picked up a fistful of sludge containing the remains of his incinerated ancestors, his family and his compatriots.
 
In my recollection of that scene from The Ascent of Man in which Bronowski says, "We have to touch people" the image flickers and slows to a complete halt.
 
Maria Tumarkin was born in 1974, the year Bronowski died, in Ukraine. Already, she is showing signs of a penetrating humanist wisdom and a singular ability to question, synthesise and communicate her findings. She's doing what Bronowski advised: asking impertinent questions in the hope of getting pertinent answers.
 
She is fascinated by, and drawn to, what she calls "traumascapes", places of shared human suffering places transformed by massacres, bombs, sieges and various acts of terror, places of physical and psychological scar tissue. Badlands. Places where the living and the dead coexist. Where past and present chafe one another.
 
In Traumascapes, her stunning literary debut, she surveys various terrible events of the past century: from Beslan and Dubrovka in Russia to Kuta and Port Arthur, from divided Berlin to besieged Sarajevo, from Shanksville where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001 to the original ground zero at Hiroshima.
 
She wanders lightly through the most macabre territory, managing paradoxically to be both sympathetic and objective and ever alert. She has the easy, persistent curiosity of a great historian in the making. She's fascinated by makeshift memorials and sacred sites, trauma tourism ("Sarajevo, the site of three modern wars in the 20th century," a tourist brochure declares) and deliberate desecration, by resilience and survival, ruination and illumination.
 
She wears a big cool heart on her sleeve yet avoids mawkishness and, on the whole, tendentiousness except when it comes to Russia. She manages to keep her cool in describing the brutish, icy excesses of the Bosnian Serbs, but she cuts the Russians little slack.
 
Traumascapes is a breathtaking work of synthesis, a mosaic of ideas and conjecture, of instinct and insight. Tumarkin doesn't offer many answers, but her finely phrased questions might fuel us for decades to come.
 
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