Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), viii + 226 pp., cloth $42.20, pbk. $18.95. Dominick LaCapra's insightful and compassionate Writing History, Writing Trauma concerns the interpretation of historical traumas such as the Holocaust and the traumas' enduring effects. LaCapra both uses and transcends contemporary critical theory in assessing the influence of trauma on present-day historical writing. Specialists conversant with the concepts of postmodern literary theory will read this work with great ease. However it will also reward nonspecialists who make the extra effort to understand the author. Among the issues explored by LaCapra is the distinction between two approaches to historiography: the documentary research model and the radical constructivist model. In the documentary model, the historian seeks to establish objective facts from archival sources and other primary documents in order to show what "really happened" in the past. 1 In radical constructivism, referential statements that make objective-truth claims apply "at best" only to events and are of marginal significance. Instead, the primary focus is on the aesthetic, ideological, and political factors that "construct" the narratives in which referential statements are embedded (p. 1). Moreover, while radical constructivists acknowledge a distinction between history and fiction with regard to actual events, they nevertheless see an "identity or essential similarity" between history and fiction at the structural level (p. 8). A central thrust of LaCapra's book is that the relativism implicit in this position can have unacceptable implications, especially for the representation of traumatic historical events. When radicals claim that historical representation consists of little more than the historian's distinctive political or ideological distortions, the gates open both to Holocaust denial and to the ascription of sublimity to some of the most destructive historical events. LaCapra is especially critical of Hayden White, who asserts that the "middle voice" is the only mode of representation appropriate to the Holocaust. 2 In the middle voice, action rather than the subject or object is emphasized. LaCapra argues that its use can obliterate the distinction between perpetrator and victim. 3 Following Jean-Paul Sartre in Nausea, White holds that life is simply a congeries of experiences that are transformed into a meaningful story only when narrated retrospectively. In view of the various ways experiences can be organized retrospectively, no definite criteria exist by which one narrative may be privileged. Given the logic of White's position, Holocaust history can be told in many ways, some of them quite vicious. Nevertheless, [End Page 158] White concedes that in the case of the Third Reich, we are "eminently justified" in eliminating a "comic" or "pastoral" story from the list of "competing narratives." 4 And LaCapra does not reject entirely use of the middle voice. He suggests that it might be appropriate for Primo Levi's "grey zone," in which victims were forced to become oppressors, as did members of the Judenräte or figures such as Tadeusz Borowski. Like White, LaCapra regards the objectivity of third-person referential statements as unsuitable for historical narratives concerning extreme trauma. He argues that such events require the historian's "empathic unsettlement," a mode of writing that blurs the binary distinction between historian and victim (p. xi). Such distinctions are inappropriate in part because of the persistent