The result of her efforts is a great gift to historians. It is by turns inspiring, instructive, revealing, astonishing, shocking, and—when considered in contrast with present-day politics—almost unbearably depressing.
Transcendence, he wants us to know, is indispensable to survival, and—as Rushdie illustrates in the transcendent telling of this horrible story—attainable. But it also is hard to sustain.