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Night

Customer Rating:
This was an amazing book. Anyone wanting to study WW2 and or just the Holocaust, this is the book to read. I rate it right up there with the Diary of Anne Frank. It is an amazing story that pulls you so you can't put it down!

What Hell Looks Like

Customer Rating:
There was obviously no joy for Elie Wiesel in writing this grisly memoir of life in a concentration camp. These are not moments to savor, to cherish, to grinningly share with the grandchildren. The darkest period of human history is recounted with no sugar coating; laid out stark and cold so that all of humanity can bear witness.

To find a reason to carry on when your world is systematically stripped bare and your soul is skewered without explanation is a challenge for even the greatest of heroes. However, Wiesel offers himself up not as a hero but rather as a subject of self-excoriation, examining the flaws of charcter that separate mice from men even in times such as those depicted. The keen observation of a teenager in the maws of death; its perfect reflection manifested in print from the perspective of later age; and the tragic but poignant description of the bonds between father and son were all reasons I could not put this book down. Wiesel reminds us with poetic gravitas of all the reasons why a nightmare such as Nazi Germany must never happen again.

Scary reminder of what mankind is capable of

Customer Rating:
I learned four things from this book. First; people are capable of doing the most horrific of deeds to each other. I seriously hope I would never do those types of things; but I have never been put in that type of situation. Second; other people are able to allow these things to happen without intervening. This is trickier, because it happens all of the time; we know bad things happen far away and feel others will take care of it. How would I react if it were happening in my own community? Third; we have a hard time accepting extremely bad news. The Jewish community had first hand accounts of the atrocities being committed, but didn't believe them. I've always wanted to believe the best and am not sure I would have acted any differently than the majority of the Jews from his little town. Fourth; some people are capable of surviving the most horrific and trying things. I'm not sure I would have been one of the survivors; it would have been easy to just give up and die. I'm so very glad that there were survivors to tell the story.

It is very interesting to see different reactions to horrible suffering as seen in the Holocaust. Wiesel documents his loss of faith in God; which would be easy to understand. As a contrast; I would recommend Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning; which documents another survivor and how he dealt with the horrors around him.

This short book is a must read. It got me thinking.

heart wrenching

Customer Rating:
In this true account of a man who has lived trough one of history's biggest atrocity, you'll find a boy facing a cold world. Forced to grow up much too fast, he becomes a man, who has to ask the important questions and has to live with the answers no matter how vague and how inconclusive. I don't know how he still believes in God.

The banal becomes terrifying, the terrifying becomes everyday "normal"

Customer Rating:
The beauty of this book lies in Elie Wiesel's ability to turn everything we know inside-out. He succeeds in taking something so extraordinary large as the Holocaust, and transforming it into something intimate and extremely personal through his restrained voice.

Through his eyes, in equal turns subjective and dispassionate, the banal becomes terrifying, the terrifying becomes everyday"normal". In a heartbeat, hope gives way to despair, but despair just as quickly can give way to hope. Wiesel's world inside the concentration camps is a world gone mad, that he manages to contain in a strange sanity that helps us, the reader, grasp and understand a small bit of what he and others experienced in Nazi Germany.

Best of all, Wiesel's restrained voice makes this book suitable for a mature, young adult reader. The story is terrifying, but it is not told with the intent to terrify the reader. The ultimate message of the work is one of hope, survival and humanity.

I listened to Night unabridged on audio CD, performed by Jeffery Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt succeeds in the ultimate task of a performer for a work like this - not going over the top, staying true to the author's voice, and letting the words and story speak for themselves.