I loved this book. It was sweet and uplifting. The first 75 pages are a mad man's ramblings and are very difficult to read. However, after that, a therapist comes on the scene and begins to bring clarity to the narrative. By the time you reach the end of the book the mad man's thoughts are ...
I'm a huge fan of Wiesel's book, Night. But having read little of his other works, I decided to give this one a chance. The title alone suggested a happier narrative than Night. But then, I just couldn't connect with it. Wiesel's voice was prominent, and his writing was still well done... I just ...
Rating: 3.5* of fiveLike any other Wiesel book, this is well worth reading. Don't be put off by the philosophy-student-at-2am first 50pp. Chapter 3, starting on p51, begins a different phase of the book and it's a much less claustrophobic experience after that.Wiesel is justly famous for the memo...
This is not a book for people who want an action packed, plot driven story. Think of this as sipping brandy, savoring and reflecting on the components of what you are tasting. A lot of food for thought, especially for someone interested in pondering moral issues.When I was a younger reader, I r...
In this primary-source document, Elie Wiesel details his personal experiences in Auschwitz. His story is unique, but the existence of concentration camps, genocide, and forced labor are not. Wiesel's story is one data point in a larger trend of 20th century, and now 21st century atrocities which ...
This book came to me by accident. I was visiting the library at Anatolia High School in Thessaloniki one day and, as is occasionally the case, there was a pile of books on a table outside the door - books that had been purged from the collection, free for the taking. I am wary of such books, as...
From Elie Wiesel, a profoundly moving novel about the healing power of compassion. Gamaliel Friedman is only a child when his family flees Czechoslovakia in 1939 for the relative safety of Hungary. For him, it will be the beginning of a life of rootlessness, disguise, and longing. Five years lat...
The book All Rivers Run to the Sea is Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his life before and after the Holocaust as well as his rise as a self-sufficient and independent character who had to look after himself. The book begins with a quick look into his childhood in Sighet and ends with his marriage to his ...
Elie Wiesel’s office at Boston University is actually at the School of Theology, where they train pastors, rather than the Religion Department, where he teaches. I happened to be assigned the locker directly next to his office, and twice over my time there I had the pleasure, while bending for a ...
I love Wiesel's words. The only problem with reading his books is that I don't want them to end. Even though this is a book of essays and speeches that were published decades ago, they remain telling and topical. After, nothing in history has changed--the Holocaust still destroyed his family--and...
"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 autho...
Twenty years after he and his family were deported from Sighet to Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel returned to his town in search of the watch—a bar mitzvah gift—he had buried in his backyard before they left.
Clear sky, invigorating breeze. In the distance, long rows of pine trees bowing to the sun. Nearby, stone buildings and wooden cabins casting off their shadows. The familiar sights and sounds of a provincial town awakening: pails drawn from the well, animals being led to the drinking trough. Firs...
Elisha as a child, an adolescent, an adult. Elisha’s birth changed my life. From that moment, I felt more concerned and responsible than ever before. This tiny creature looking at me without seeing me would have to be protected. And the best way to protect him would be to change the world in whic...
Emerson said with typical simplicity: Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hidd...
Is it a powerful and implacable rebellion against linear or discursive thought? What does it seek, except to push tradition and heritage to the bottom of the abyss? Is it the rejection of what seems stable, well-founded, precise, necessary and inevitable? Finally, it is the victory of words, Pari...
A feeling of superiority? No, of singularity. Why does the city of Hebron hold a special place in the biblical geography? Its name is Kiryat Arba, the city of the four. Four couples have their graves there: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, in other words the fat...
His unshaven face was the same as ever, its expression frozen, but his clothing changed from moment to moment—from his Shabbat suit to the striped rags of the damned and back again. Where had he come from? From what landscape had he escaped? Who sent him? I can’t recall if I asked. All I remember...
Aren’t we all a little mad, each of us in his own way? Mad to wish to live and to refuse to live, mad to believe in the future and also to negate it, mad to think that we have eluded death and the dead? The ones that pursue me belong to a different species. Not all are Jewish. There are among the...
Whatever he was doing, he liked to throw himself into it with a feeling of complete freedom. When he was writing, or taking a walk in Central Park with his two sons, he thought only of them and their future. Even when he was doing nothing, he dismissed everything else from his mind so he could be...
I was almost nineteen and life was beautiful. The world was crumbling around me, but I didn’t mind. On the contrary: I felt alive—living, as the expression goes, intensely. I had begun writing poems and more poems. They were not worth much, and I no longer like them; I prefer those I wrote later,...