SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron (1976, novel, 515 pages)

Sophie’s choice is a towering literary accomplishment. This book—winner of the National Book Award in 1980—presents a carefully-researched fictional treatment of the Holocaust. The book is a pa… Read full post »

DEATH DEALER: THE MEMOIRS OF THE SS KOMMANDANT AT AUSCHWITZ by Rudolph Hoss (written 1946-1947) [1: See endnote #1]

As SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners (Jews and non-Jews). [2]

After the Nazis… Read full post »

THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION by Daniel Mendelsohn (non-fiction, 2006, 513 pages)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s great-uncle, Shmiel Jager, and Shmiel’s wife and four daughters were all “killed by the Nazis”, and for decades, these four words were the… Read full post »

MASTERS OF DEATH: THE SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN AND THE INVENTION OF THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Rhodes (2002, 335 pages)

When most people think of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” (the plan to exterminate all Jews), they think of the gas chambers.

But the gas chambers we… Read full post »

LIGHTNING AND ASHES by John Guzlowski (2007, 86 pages, poetry)

This is a book of poems about the Holocaust.

This book was written by John Guzlowski, both of whose parents were Polish Catholic survivors of Nazi concentration camps… Read full post »

SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ: IF THIS IS A MAN by Primo Levi (1959, 153 pages, memoir)

Here is an extraordinary memoir that chronicles the 11 months that Jewish-Italian chemist Primo Levi spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz until its liberation. Levi, being a scientist,… Read full post »

MAUS I: MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY by Art Spiegelman (graphic novel / comic book, 1993, 159 pages)

MAUS I: MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY is, I think, the only comic book ever to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer committee created a special category for… Read full post »

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL, by Anne Frank (written 1942-1944, 283 pages)

Somehow I had spent my first 40 years on this planet without reading Anne Frank’s diary.

As I recently embarked upon my first-ever reading of the book, despite… Read full post »

NIGHT by Elie Wiesel (1955, 133 pages: a memoir)

Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel is best-known for this stunning memoir about his life as a prisoner in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and about the times leading up to this incarceration.… Read full post »

The last survivors of the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945.

For the most part, the Jews who were allowed to live (mostly as slaves) in the concentration camps were those of working age. The old and the young (typically age 14 or lower) were often… Read full post »

Five quotes from the 2009 novel “A gate at the stairs” by Lorrie Moore:

1. We passed the Vanmares' old farmhouse, where they had decorated the front yard again in a completely random holiday fashion: silhouettes of penguins, palm trees, geese, and candy canes all lit up as… Read full post »

Three quotes from “The Best American Mystery Stories 1998”, edited by Sue Grafton and Otto Penzler:

1. Sometimes a man quits trusting his strengths and starts trusting his weaknesses. His weaknesses are more apt to be dependable. (From "Swear not by the moon" by Scott Bartels.)… Read full post »

Yann Martel’s 2001 fantasy-adventure novel “Life of Pi” won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Here are five quotes from it:

1. A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, "Stay out!" with its urine or other secretion, we… Read full post »

Five quotes from “The end of the affair”, a 1951 novel by Graham Greene:

1. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with… Read full post »

Three quotes from “Open: An autobiography” by Andre Agassi (2009):

1. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.

2. Nothing is quite so unsettling as watching your opponent do pilates,… Read full post »

Three quotes from “Dark Consequences”, a 2004 book of horror stories by television writer and former professional wrestler Ed Ferrara:

1. As the gentle breeze blew his smoke-stained sheer curtains inward like two ghostly hands reaching toward him, it also carried with it the smel… Read full post »

Hey Winter, bring on a few more snow-days. Please.

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Fault line by Barry Eisler (2009 / thriller novel)

“Everyone had bedtime rituals. Some needed a bath; others, a cup of tea. Some liked to read in bed; others, to… Read full post »

Three quotes from “Fault line”, a 2009 thriller novel by Barry Eisler:

1. Once selected, candidates [for the military's Joint Special Operations Command] were put through…"the Final,"…in which the candidate was drugged, hooded, flown to a third-world country he had… Read full post »

Five quotes from Stephen King’s second novel, “’Salem’s Lot” (1975):

1. …Mark had the entire set of Aurora plastic monsters—wolfman, mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, the mad doctor, and even the Chamber of Horrors. [Danny's] mother thought all that stu… Read full post »

Three quotes from “The financial lives of the poets”, a 2009 novel by Jess Walter:

1.                       Higher than expected orders and

a reversal of its earnings direction

h… Read full post »

Three quotes from the 1953 short-story collection “The enormous radio & other stories” by John Cheever:

1. It was a walkup. You rang the bell above the mailbox in the vestibule and were answered with a death rattle in the lock.

2. Irene shifted the… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The haunting of Hill House", a 1959 horror novel by Shirley Jackson:

1. No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting… Read full post »

Three quotes from "Peter Pan", a 1911 children's fantasy novel by James Matthew Barrie:

1. 'I don't want ever to be a man,' [Peter Pan] said with passion. 'I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.'

2. [Captain Hook] lay at his ease in a… Read full post »

Here are three quotes from “A book of love poetry”, a 1974 anthology edited by Oxford Professor of English Jon Stallworthy and including work from over 190 poets. This set of quotes does not do justice to the breadth of poets, eras, and cultures represented in the book. But these are… Read full post »

Three quotes from "The brief and frightening reign of Phil", a 2005 satirical science-fiction novella by George Saunders:

1. It's one thing to be a small country, but the country of Inner Horner was so small only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six… Read full post »