Wiesel, Elie Books

Night (Oprah's Book Club)

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 631 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The banal becomes terrifying, the terrifying becomes everyday "normal" 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

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.

Editorial 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.

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, Day

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Must Read 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is a must read - for everyone! A real, raw and riviting account of Ellie Wiesel's personal experience during the Holocaust. Starting when no one believed the pending danger of war... to the formation of ghettos and finally life in a concentration camp. His Nobel Peace Price Acceptance Speech at the end of the book is an important bonus! We must NEVER FORGET... Ellie's account will help.

Editorial Review:

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1960, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day. In the short novel Dawn (1961), a young man who has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine is apprenticed to a Jewish underground movement, where the former victim is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. In Day (previously titled The Accident, 1962), Wiesel questions the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old?

Wiesel’s trilogy offers meditations on mankind’s attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

Night

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 926 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What eyes could not see 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

From the moment we had began on this book in our classes it was truly an eye opener. Words cannot describe the misery that was felt in each and every word this book had within. The book itself had casted night over all of us, especially me as we listened intently on what could be known as the most heart striking tale. From the start of the camp to the death marchings in the snow, the story gives a full eye account of the horror that was seen in the Nazi war. No story ever has been written so amazingly nor dramaticly as this. Yes, it touched me darkly and it burned deeply but this story, this story is something everyone should read because no one should forget what happened so long ago. You cant go your whole life without reading this book, its something that you should not miss.

I give it a rating of five stars and I hope you, the reader, can also find that too.

Editorial 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.

Dawn

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

In just one word? Terrorism 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

A survivor of this becomes a proponent for that. . .by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Ellie Wiesel's fictional "Dawn" is all too true; all too often repeated.
Terrorized as a Jew by Nazis in World War II, Elisha now terrorizes as a Jew for a free Palestine.
Swap out the name of the Holocast survived and the name of the cause proposed and you have the skeleton of all political or religious terrorism. The terrorists will always be with us. . .they usually will win. . .the body count will certainly rise. It will always be the season of terror.

Editorial Review:

“The author…has built knowledge into artistic fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review

Elisha is a young Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, and an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine; John Dawson is the captured English officer he will murder at dawn in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The night-long wait for morning and death provides Dawn, Elie Wiesel’s ever more timely novel, with its harrowingly taut, hour-by-hour narrative. Caught between the manifold horrors of the past and the troubling dilemmas of the present, Elisha wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and ultimately God as he waits for the appointed hour and his act of assassination. Dawn is an eloquent meditation on the compromises, justifications, and sacrifices that human beings make when they murder other human beings.

The Trial of God

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Trial of Faith 5 out of 5 stars.
38 of 41 people found this review helpful.

While interred in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel witnessed a trial. While such things are not unusual, this trial was. It was unusual because of the defendant: God. God was tried for violating the covenant by turning his back in silence on the Jewish people in their greatest hour of need. God was tried in absentia, without anyone present being willing to take on the role of God's defense attorney. God was declared guilty, after which the "court" prayed. Contradiction? Perhaps. But this incident, which served as the inspiration for *The Trial of God*, is part of the long Jewish tradition of arguing with God. While Job is God's most famous interlocuter, we cannot forget the dispute the founder of the Jewish people, Abraham, had with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The trial of God is really a trial of faith; this is why the "court" prayed. They are torn between their devotion to God and their complete disappointment in God's silence. This struggle of faith is the story of *The Trial of God*, in which it is the least faithful of all, Satan, that comes to God's defense. Wiesel is fond of retelling a story about two Holocaust survivors, one a rabbi, who meet after liberation. The survivor asks the rabbi how, after all that has happened, he can continue to believe in God. The rabbi retorts by asking how, after all that has happened, can the other *not* believe in God. Wiesel has often echoed this paradox in his own sentiments. This is the paradox which *the Trial of God* presents us; it is a story of doubting trust and trusting doubt which, as Wiesel suggests, might be reconcilable only in protest. Perhaps *The Trial of God* is Wiesel's act of faith; perhaps it is an act of condemnation. I suspect that for Wiesel it is both. Anyone who pays careful attention to this work will be highly rewarded by it, not because of the answers it gives (for it gives none), but (in good Wieselian style) for the questions it raises.

Editorial Review:

Set in a medieval European village where three itinerant Jewish actors put God on trial to answer for His silence during a pogrom, a powerful drama considers historical and especially post-Holocaust issues surrounding faith. Reprint.

All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

6 stars? 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the times when I think we should be able to go higher than 5 stars. Elie Wiesel's All Rivers Run to the Sea gave us a more in-depth look to the concentration camp survivor. He really gives us a rich experience in weaving together the threads of his past, from his days in school to the horror in the concentration camps, right up to his days of being a journalist, and ending with him as a groom. You really get a feel for the type of person he is as well - a wonderful, compassionate, and intelligent man. If you've read Night already, you're definitely going to want to check this out.

disagree with "mediocre" label 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I found this a very compelling read, lasting over several readings. It's true the author did not stick tightly to chronological order, but anyone who has read his fiction knows his style tends to be very esoteric and rather free-floating (I personally do not care for his fiction, which I admit I do find to go over my head). However, as a reader, I certainly got a feel for emotions he felt throughout different experiences in his life. I found the last scene describing his emotions before and during his wedding to be really profound. It's true that there is a lot of Jewish content in this book, which may cause some of his analogies etc. to be less accessible to someone from a different background. However, for someone who wants to read a first-hand Holocaust experience without very strong graphic details, I do recommend it. (As a side note, just last week I actually attended a speech by Mr. Wiesel, and he is really a personable, funny, self-effacing and sweet man, not the really sad and somber person you might expect from his writings. I was surprised by this, pleasantly so!)

Editorial Review:

The long-awaited memoirs of Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, tell the story of his happy childhood in the Carpathian Mountains, his subsequent years of hell in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and his post-war life in France, where he discovered his voice as a writer. Highly recommended.

After the Darkness: Reflections on the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A poignant, powerful distillation of the Holocaust experience from the internationally acclaimed writer and Nobel laureate.

In his first book, Night, Elie Wiesel described his concentration camp experience, but he has rarely written directly about the Holocaust since then. Now, as the last generation of survivors is passing and a new generation must be introduced to mankind’s darkest hour, Wiesel sums up the most important aspects of Hitler’s years in power and provides a fitting memorial to those who suffered and perished. He writes about the creation of the Third Reich, Western acquiescence, the gas chambers, and memory. He criticizes Churchill and Roosevelt for what they knew and ignored, and he praises little-known Jewish heroes. Augmenting Wiesel’s text are testimonies from survivors, who recall, among other moments and events: the establishment of the Nurembourg Laws, Kristallnacht, transport to the camps, and liberation.

With this book—richly illustrated with 45 photographs from the U.S. Holocaust
Museum—Wiesel proves once again the ineluctable importance of bearing witness.

Day: A Novel

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Not since Albert Camus has there been such an eloquent spokesman for man." --The New York Times Book Review
The publication of Day restores Elie Wiesel’s original title to the novel initially published in English as The Accident and clearly establishes it as the powerful conclusion to the author’s classic trilogy of Holocaust literature, which includes his memoir Night and novel Dawn. “In Night it is the ‘I’ who speaks,” writes Wiesel. “In the other two, it is the ‘I’ who listens and questions.”
In its opening paragraphs, a successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps off a New York City curb and into the path of an oncoming taxi. Consequently, most of Wiesel’s masterful portrayal of one man’s exploration of the historical tragedy that befell him, his family, and his people transpires in the thoughts, daydreams, and memories of the novel’s narrator. Torn between choosing life or death, Day again and again returns to the guiding questions that inform Wiesel’s trilogy: the meaning and worth of surviving the annihilation of a race, the effects of the Holocaust upon the modern character of the Jewish people, and the loss of one’s religious faith in the face of mass murder and human extermination.

The Forgotten

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Moving on several levels 5 out of 5 stars.
30 of 35 people found this review helpful.

The Forgotten explores both the holocaust experiences of the aging father, and his new horror of losing his memory. Both are intensely moving, whether seen through his own eyes, or those of his son struggling to fulfill a difficult obligation. Like all of Elie Wiesel's writings, this book stays with you and influences your own thinking on many topics. A sad story, unforgettable.

Professor Wiesel did me the honor of writing a blurb for my novel, The Heretic (Library of American Fiction), which describes anti-Judaism on the eve of the Spanish Inquisition. I also invite you to consider my new novel, A Good Conviction, the story of a young man in Sing Sing prison, wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit.

Editorial Review:

A profoundly moving novel about a Holocaust survivor's struggle to remember both the heroic and the shameful events of his past, and about his American-born son's need to assimilate his father's life into his own. "A book of shattering force that offers a message of urgency to a world under the spell of trivia and the tyranny of amnesia."--Chicago Tribune Book World.

Night

Elie Wiesel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A must read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

For me this book was a horrifying read filled with images of destruction of life and the human soul. Wiesel's record of his experience in Auschwitz and Buchenwald caused me to question the depth of humanity's depravity towards one another. Also, you have to admire Wiesel's honesty in admitting his thoughts and the conflict he faced when dealing with his father. Most of us probably couldn't imagine doing such a thing towards our parents but when human existence has been whittled down to just surviving another day, I wonder how far we would go in Weisel's shoes.

I read this book because it was referred to in an earlier book I read i.e. The Freedom Writer's Diary and I am not sorry that I read it. I recommend everyone to read it so that it might increase our awareness of what went on during the Holocaust and help us prevent similar events from happening.

Editorial Review:

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor's perspective, "Night" is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.