"Night", Elie Wiesel
A lot of you have probably read this book before - I've been told that it's often assigned reading in high school or university history classes. But I, for whatever reason, had never gotten my hands on a copy until a dear friend gave me one for Christmas...so here I am, to introduce those of you haven't read it, and to ask for opinions from those who have.
TITLE: "NIGHT"
AUTHOR: Elie Wiesel
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: The briefest summary one can give is this: It's the story of a young boy who lives through watching his entire family die at the hands of those who lead the Nazi death camps.
Not sure how much more disturbing you can get than that, really, since it's a true story.
As always, there are better sources for synopses and outlines than I, so I shall defer to them:
From Amazon.com
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's wrenching attempt to find meaning in the horror of the Holocaust is technically a novel, but it's based so closely on his own experiences in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald that it's generally--and not inaccurately--read as an autobiography. Like Wiesel himself, the protagonist of Night is a scholarly, pious teenager racked with guilt at having survived the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
Yeah, it kind of bugs me that this has become one of Oprah's Book Club picks (argh), but the fact is that it's an amazing, simple, affecting book. My copy is a very slim 109 pages, so you can imagine how little filler there is; the book gets to the brutal point very quickly and effectively. Having studied in university the MAUS books (Art Spiegelman's graphic novels about the Holocaust - I strongly recommend them & will definitely do a post on them in the near future), I thought I'd never feel the same stab at my heart when reading about that unspeakably horrifying time in history, but Elie's account has a simplicity and straightforwardness that just...hurts. And once you pick it up, you can't put it down. Once you've read it, you won't forget it.
Worth looking at: www.nightthebook.com.
I'm curious to know if any of you have read this, and if anyone's read the author's other related works:
...and there are others, too, if you search the author's name on Amazon. Thoughts? Reviews? Recommendations?
TITLE: "NIGHT"
AUTHOR: Elie Wiesel
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: The briefest summary one can give is this: It's the story of a young boy who lives through watching his entire family die at the hands of those who lead the Nazi death camps.
Not sure how much more disturbing you can get than that, really, since it's a true story.
As always, there are better sources for synopses and outlines than I, so I shall defer to them:
From Amazon.com
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's wrenching attempt to find meaning in the horror of the Holocaust is technically a novel, but it's based so closely on his own experiences in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald that it's generally--and not inaccurately--read as an autobiography. Like Wiesel himself, the protagonist of Night is a scholarly, pious teenager racked with guilt at having survived the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
Yeah, it kind of bugs me that this has become one of Oprah's Book Club picks (argh), but the fact is that it's an amazing, simple, affecting book. My copy is a very slim 109 pages, so you can imagine how little filler there is; the book gets to the brutal point very quickly and effectively. Having studied in university the MAUS books (Art Spiegelman's graphic novels about the Holocaust - I strongly recommend them & will definitely do a post on them in the near future), I thought I'd never feel the same stab at my heart when reading about that unspeakably horrifying time in history, but Elie's account has a simplicity and straightforwardness that just...hurts. And once you pick it up, you can't put it down. Once you've read it, you won't forget it.
Worth looking at: www.nightthebook.com.
I'm curious to know if any of you have read this, and if anyone's read the author's other related works:
...and there are others, too, if you search the author's name on Amazon. Thoughts? Reviews? Recommendations?