Archive for April 2011

#19 "Night" by Elie Wiesel


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I finished Night by Elie Wiesel.  It's only 109 pages long and it's a quick read so I can't tell you why it took me so long to finish it.  I've been really bad about reading lately.  REALLY bad.  This book was good.  It was a rather short account of a man's time going through concentration camps as a Jewish teen.  It's always depressing, yet fascinating to read these accounts from the view of someone who was actually there and went through it.  This is obviously a fictionalized account based on true events, but it is still a rather brutal story.

 The most interesting thing to me about Wiesel's account of what happened at Auschwitz (and other camps) is reading about how desensitized the prisoners became, no longer caring who died, whether a family member or not.  That is very real to me and, maybe it's the psychologist in my coming out, but how could you not become that way after years of living in a concentration camp?


*Spoiler Alert*
One thing that annoyed me about the book was that there is absoutely no account of Wiesel's time after his father passed away.  He claims in the book that this is because he no longer cared about anything that was happening, but to me that is exactly why I would want to read about it.  A completely indifferent account of the story.

I know this is short today, but the book was short.  Deal.

This book is RECOMMENDED.

First line teaser:  "They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life."

Up Next:  The next book club selection  which will be announced at our meeting tonight!