I ended up going to Krakow, Poland for Easter weekend, and while I was debating whether visiting Auschwitz would be crass or an important educational moment, I decided it might not be bad to read a book related to the Holocaust in preparation for the trip. I didn’t actually finish this until after my visit to Auschwitz but I appreciated having a personal story to attach to the victims since at some point the brain stops processing the scale of large numbers. The book follows […]
NightinFail
Spoilers in this review. This book made me tired. I confess, I do not get what everyone sees in The Nightingale. I feel like because it is set in WWII/the Holocaust, and we know that terrible things happened, this book had ALL OF THE TERRIBLE THINGS and we just accept that EVERY TERRIBLE THING happened to the characters because, of course, it was a time of terrible things. But it was too much; it was simply not believable to me after a point. But I’m […]
In which I take another step toward beatific acceptance of my plebian taste
This probably qualifies as another lit-fic fail for me, by which I don’t mean that the book was a failure; I mostly likely just failed to appreciate it. It’s one of those oniony books that has a lot of layers, and characters who relate to each other on levels both appropriate and otherwise. Set in the 1960’s, there’s a story of a young woman who finds out she is of European Jewish descent, and finds herself digging into her history by way of trying to […]
My Last Chance to Feel Human
I’m not sure how to review this book. For those who don’t know (am I the only one who never had to read this in high school?), the first half is an account of Frankl’s time in concentration camps during World War II, while the second half discusses in more detail the psychotherapy that Frankl developed, logotherapy. And now that I’ve summarized it, I still don’t know how to proceed from here. I don’t think this book can be reviewed in the traditional sense–I certainly don’t want […]
Chasing Ghosts
What once appeared to be a simple legacy — a grandfather who escaped, who created a better life away from the European killing fields — became a story of a world upended, a life set aside, a narrative rerouted. This non-fiction work by journalist Sarah Wildman is not the usual account of the Holocaust. After her grandfather’s death, she found a trove of letters written to him from the girlfriend he left behind in Austria after the 1938 Anschluss. Her grandfather Karl Wildman, as the […]
A child’s view of the Holocaust
I sometimes peruse Goodreads reviews, especially for books like Fifty Shades of Grey, because there are some hilarious “ZOMG this book is hottt!!!!” reviews followed by vitriol like you never would believe (well. I totally can). Never have I been so surprised to read vehement responses against John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. The anger is almost hilarious–“kids don’t really talk like that!!!” “How stupid were these people??? They HAD to know about the Holocaust!!!” etc. I like to call this response a […]
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