In ways impossible in adversarial court trials, truth commissions offer healing balm to hurt minds. Tears in public will not be the last tears, but knowing that one's tears are seen may grant a sense of acknowledgment that makes grief less lonely and terrifying. There are no tidy endings following mass atrocity. The final method Minow explores, facing history, requires a careful balance. To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting.
Great danger lies either way.
Though Minow pays little attention to the distinctive gifts of religious people and organizations in peacemaking, her sensitivity to the ethical dimensions of antagonism and healing makes her book a sober and distinguished contribution to this difficult subject. In its mixture of realism, complexity and hope, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness offers a remarkable analysis of a troublesome legacy that the 20th century is about to bequeath to the 21st. Reviewed by Donald W. Shriver Jr., president emeritus and William E. Dodge Professor of Applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York.