Just Beneath the Soil - by Clint Smith (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How the Word Is Passed takes us on an astonishingly original--and heartbreakingly intimate--journey to meet some of World War II's witnesses before they're gone.

"This is a riveting, serious tour de force." --Ken Burns

Clint Smith's great-uncle Lawrence landed on a beach at Normandy in the summer of 1944. Lawrence grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi, and Smith had always wondered what his uncle felt, fighting fascism and racial hatred on behalf of a country that was subjecting him and his family to racial apartheid. His uncle's experience wasn't consistent with the story of World War II being the "good war" as Smith had been taught in school.

In this enthralling, lyrical account, Smith follows his curiosity across four continents to uncover other stories obscured by the War's mythology. He begins in the Navajo Nation, where he meets the last surviving Code Talkers, and heads to the former incarceration camps in California where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the war. When he travels abroad, he finds echoes of the racial hatred that distorts American life and the silencing that perpetuates it. In Nagasaki, where Americans dropped their second atomic bomb, Smith bears witness to survivors' stories and finds that the bomb may not have been the necessary evil he'd been told it was. The heartbreaking stories he hears from the so-called "Comfort Women," survivors of sex slavery by the Japanese military, are often met with complete denial in Japan. In Germany, he finds multiple memorials atoning for the sins of the Holocaust, but their contrition has a dark side. And in Argentina, where many of the Holocaust's perpetrators fled, few talked about the thousands of Nazis who found sanctuary there, though their ghosts loomed over the towns where they hid.

Every place he goes, Smith's unique gift for eliciting astonishing, personal stories brings this global conflict down to the unit of the individual. Each of these portraits--of people, of places, of memories--acts as a powerful reminder that how we tell the story of the past shapes our understanding of the world today.

Review Quotes

"Clint Smith's odyssey from Normandy to Nagasaki to Dachau examines how the greatest cataclysm of modern history continues to stir the world's memory in rich, surprising, and at times chillingly contradictory ways--a virtuosic journey at once moving and revelatory." --Erik Larson, author of The Demon of Unrest

"Walt Whitman was certain that 'future years will never know the seething hell and black infernal background' of the Civil War; 'The real war, ' he added, 'will never get in the books.' We are so fortunate that one of our best listeners and writers, Clint Smith, has penetrated the opacity of World War II, the greatest cataclysm in world history, and understood the thin veneer of civilization that lies (Whitman again) in 'the countless minor scenes and interiors.' This is a riveting, serious tour de force." --Ken Burns, author of The American Revolution

"Clint Smith invites us to discover what forgiveness means for an individual, what accountability looks like for a nation, what it might take to prevent cycles of atrocity from repeating. Smith's adventures all around the world are richly peopled with unforgettable, impeccably drawn characters, each orbiting the great central questions of our moment: How shall we live as inheritors of a barbarous history? How might that history fortify, rather than corrode, our grace and shared humanity? It's vital work. Future generations will call this book what it already plainly is--essential, a classic of and for our moment." ―Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"Clint Smith's Just Beneath the Soil is a remarkable narrative of history and memory. Smith is intellectually curious, morally intrepid, and straight-out brilliant as he takes every measured step in the fields of our 20th-century global devastation. Victim, perpetrator, defeated, or survivor--Smith goes far beyond simple categories of historical identities by allowing us to actually witness and in a way experience the events which have shaped who we are today. This book is a sublime gift of imagination, sympathy, and significant reporting." --Min Jin Lee, author of American Hagwon and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award

"An extraordinary double-stranded narrative of harrowing, traumatizing events and Clint Smith's viscerally-experienced first-person reception of them. Smith asks how the memory of a nation's marginalized victims of atrocity necessarily goes against the grain of national, self-aggrandizing memory and how nations make room for both. Listening deeply to these survivors' stories, he does not look away, or shut down, or tune out. That is how the word is passed--with fortitude, courage, and empathy." --James Young, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst

"Societies, just like individuals, have to learn how to move from moral judgement alone to historical understanding and emotional acceptance of our humanity. Understanding complexity is not the same as excusing wrongdoing. Smith does a masterful job mining stories of victims and perpetrators that many folks will know a little about. But he also probes the emotional depths of witnesses to the worst kinds of violence. Smith's book is one of the very best in documenting that war does not stop when the shooting stops . . . wars continue in the memories, debates, silences, and wounds carried by communities for generations. A classic." --Dr. Gordon "Nick" Mueller, President & CEO Emeritus of the National World War II Museum

About the Author

CLINT SMITH is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Stowe Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Counting Descent and the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Clint taught high school English in Prince George's County, Maryland, where he was named the Christine D. Sarbanes Teacher of the Year by the Maryland Humanities Council. He is the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. He received his B.A. from Davidson College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.