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Night (Oprah's Book Club)
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Product Description
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #931 in Books
- Published on: 2006-01-16
- Released on: 2006-01-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 120 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and 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.
Review
"A slim volume of terrifying power" -- The New York Times
"I gain courage from his courage" -- Oprah Winfrey
"No one has left behind him so moving a record." -- Alfred Kazin
From the Inside Flap
Born in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and then to Buchenwald. Night is the terrifying record of Elie Wiesel's memories of the death of his family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair as a deeply observant Jew confronting the absolute evil of man. This new translation by his wife and most frequent translator, Marion Wiesel, corrects important details and presents the most accurate rendering in English of Elie Wiesel's testimony to what happened in the camps and of his unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again. This edition also contains a new preface by the author.
Customer Reviews
Night
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
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
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.
