Night (Oprah's Book Club) by Elie Wiesel Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Night (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: A Very Important Book
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is very intense and heart wrenching. An important read for anyone. It should be considered a "must" for young folks who may see Hitler's abosolute evil as a distant past but this man's experience brings the the enormity of it into our hearts.Book Review: A Very Important Book
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, this is a very important book, although it makes for such painful reading. At the age of 15, Wiesel and his parents and his little sister were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps. When an SS guard barked, "Men to the left! Women to the right!" he lost his mother and sister forever. He subsequently clung to his father, although he was ashamed of dishonoring him by not standing up to the Germans who beat and humiliated him. In this excellent translation by his wife Marion, Wiesel offers up a horrific and extremely personal account of the Holocaust. He relates his own pain at being a deeply observant Jew who comes to feel abandoned by his God, unable to comprehend the absolute evil that mankind has wrought, with no divine intervention to answer even the most desperate of prayers. Eventually, his father gives up all hope because of his extreme suffering and dies, just before the Allies liberate Buchenwald. A shattered Wiesel, who would remain tormented by his memories for the rest of his life, finally becomes a free man and goes forward to tell his eyewitness tale so that this shameful era of history will not be forgotten. Many years later, in 1986, he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in honor of the Jewish people.Book Review: A Voice for Those Lost in the Night
Summary: 5 Stars
As a student, I chose to read this book for its historical value, but as I read the story, my emotions became intertwined with the author's. Night by Elie Wiesel is so much more than a book of dates and events. It is the story untold by those who were murdered in the Holocaust. It is the raw experience of a young boy who was forced to live through it.
Wiesel describes the physical burden throughout his very own persecution but also the mental and emotional agony of everyone around him. He captures the hope of children and parents along with the sorrow of the damned. Wiesel lives through the Holocaust to tell his story but not without hardship. Besides fighting the weakness and pain of his own body, he internally battles with himself. The liberation of death is always on Wiesel's mind. His faith in the one God he has devoted his life to is questioned.
This short book will grip all readers past the last page. It is the voice for all those not as lucky as Elie Wiesel. I am more grateful for my own life after reading Night. I strongly recommend this book to any audience.
Book Review: A Wakeup Call
Summary: 5 Stars
Elie's strength throughout his nightmare at the camp makes one think how one would behave in those shoes. A must read for all schools so that these horrific slaughters NEVER happens again. Mr. Wiesel speech at the Noble Peace award was so profund.Book Review: A Walk Towards Destruction
Summary: 5 Stars
Some books, it seems, are almost beyond mere review. NIGHT is about Elie Wiesel's time in Nazi concentration camps. Really, what can one add? The description alone says an awful lot. So let us not focus on subject and instead focus on readability.
NIGHT is very readable. It is not, however, a scholarly study. Many other books provide much better detail and history of the Nazi camps designed either to exterminate undesirables outright or, alternatively, work them to death. NIGHT, rather than being scholarly, is personal. It does not bring the concentration camps to life. It brings Elie Wiesel to life as he lived it in those camps and, more ominously, the life he led before them.
That life before heading to the extermination camps is of equal importance to the life in the camps itself. A basic yet terrifying rule of totalitarian ideologies and the political movements that bring them to fruition is that they do not advertise the barbaric methods that will ultimately be employed in order to achieve their ideological goals. Concentration camps were such extreme institutions that, even given the generations of anti-semitism, they seemed beyond belief until it was much too late. Wiesel and his family (and others in his village) were indeed warned as to what was awaiting them. Yet the stories were so far out there, so incomprehensible, that they were scoffed at. That is perhaps the most important lesson of the book.
At a little over 100 pages, NIGHT is actually a bit skimpy in its descriptions. Yet it provides enough. It provides the big pictures - endless work, ravenous hunger, brutality of the guards and other prisoners and, most distressing, the slipping away of one's own humanity as survival becomes so precarious that one's concerns even for loved ones slips away in the face of self-preservation.
Part memorial, part warning, NIGHT was Wiesel's first book. It could have been his last and his reputation would still be significant. It is a dark but worthwhile read about a very dark time.