Night (Oprah's Book Club)

Customer Reviews

• Powerful is an understatement  Jan 18, 2006 (513 of 544 found this helpful)

  I recall when I first read 'Night', it was just after Elie Wiesel had given a lecture at my university. It was in the mid-1980s, and the lecture hall was standing-room-only. Wiesel's presentation moved us to tears, and moved us to anger, and moved me to want to follow up on his words by reading what he had written.
  
  This is supposed to be fiction, but in a style that seems to be typical of many modern Israeli novelists, it is so close to the truth of the actual events that transpired in Wiesel's life that it might as well be treated as autobiographical. This is actually part of a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and The Accident - although each element stands alone with integrity.
  
  How does one deal with survival after such atrocities as that at Birkenau and Auschwitz? How can one have faith in the world? How can one accept that a people so closely identified with a powerful God can ever accept that God again? Where is God in the midst of such things?
  
  Wiesel himself as spent his life in search of such answers, but doesn't provide them here. Why then would one want to read such accounts as these? Wiesel was silent for many years, until he was brought into speech and writing as a witness to the events. Wiesel proclaims that there is in the world now a new commandment - 'Thou shalt not stand idly by' - when such things are happening, one must act. One must remember the past in all its personal aspects to both honour those who suffered and to forestall such things happening again (which, given the the depressing repetitive nature of history, is a difficult task).
  
  This is the longest short book I've ever read. It is one that has stayed with me from the first page, and I've never been able to shake the images brought forward, the misery and suffering, the existence of evil and brutality, the sadness and desolation. We live in a culture that likes to gloss over pain and suffering, mask it with drugs and other things, and always end the story with a happy ending.
  
  There is no happy ending here - even Wiesel's own survival is a questionable good here. How does one live after this? How does the world go on?
  
  One thing is certain, we must never forget, and this book is part of that active remembering that we are called to do.
  
  

• Brutality of Apathy Revealed in Relentless Detail and Still Sadly Resonant Far Beyond the Holocaust  Jan 18, 2006 (37 of 39 found this helpful)

  In a world that often feels like it is teetering toward relenting madness, Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting 1960 memoir still reminds us that there was a precedent for the deranged mindset that justifies acts of terrorism. In a concise, unadorned manner, he relives the spiraling insanity that surrounded the Jewish population of Sighet, Transylvania, as insulated a world as one could imagine and certainly a community who understandably could not embrace the insanity of the extermination occurring around them. Inevitably, they are taken to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous concentration camps, where Wiesel provides painfully palpable detail of the day-to-day living conditions. He not only records the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi guards toward the Jews, as other have, but more tellingly, describes the inhumanity of the camp inmates toward each other for the sake of survival.
  
  It's a stark peek into the nature of evil that is at once uncomfortable to acknowledge and invaluable to read and absorb. The propagation of evil from forces unexpected is what makes Wiesel's book resonate today. As we consider the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Dili and Liquica Church massacres in East Timor, the 1994 Rwandan genocide (dramatized in the superb film, 2004's "Hotel Rwanda"), or most pertinently, the detention camps that exist today in North Korea, it is obvious that the Third Reich did not have a monopoly on justifying such slaughter. With his two older sisters, Wiesel was able to survive the camps and share his devastating story with future generations. Compressed from a much larger memoir Wiesel wrote in Yiddish, the book represents a powerfully affecting treatment that edits the key moments of his existence to their essence. The result is elliptical and startling. Like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" series, William Styron's "Sophie's Choice", Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's List" and of course, the most heartbreaking, Anne Frank's diary, Wiesel's work lends yet another piercing look into the unanticipated breaches of the human soul during one of history's most dire times. Strongly recommended.

• Incredible Journey Into the Dark Night of the Soul  Jan 18, 2006 (163 of 196 found this helpful)

  Elie Wiesel's narrative of his own one-year experience spent in a concentration camp has appropriately become a classic in the field. Read it to find meaning in a seeming meaningless life. Read "Night" if you are going through your own "dark night of the soul" and want to find an answer to the perennial question, "Where is God?" Read "Night" if you think deeply about life and how it often falls on us and crushes us. Don't read "Night" only if you have a queasy stomach or the need to think that this life is a bed of roses.
  
  Wiesel discovered that, "God is there in the suffering." His explanation is anything but trite. Instead, it grapples candidly with the confusion that life can and does bring. Fortunately Wiesel's candor leads to hope--the confidence that behind the evils in this life there resides a good God working out plans in a mysterious, yet glorious, way. The inner depths and black darkness of "Night" call us not to squeamish forgetting but to stark remembering. For only in remembering will we insist, "Never again!"
  
  Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Spiritual Friends: A Methodology of Soul Care And Spiritual Direction, and Soul Physicians.

• Breath Taking Experience....  May 24, 2006 (20 of 21 found this helpful)

  "Night" by: Elie Wiesel...was a breathtaking read.
  
  I came across "Night" as a school assignment. Which=a major grade. I started to read it as a chore...but as I dove deeper into the depth of the this novel..it was like a gift of appreciation. The appreciation of "FREEDOM" that we take for granted everyday.
  
  When you read this book...it is literally like you personally, were shipped off to a German Concentration camp. I recall feeling a deep sympathy for the unexpecting Jews. Noone should be treated as these people were...and we take the Freedom that we have as a given. But, what happened in "Night" just goes to show, that we can not take this free life that we live for granted. God can test your faith just as he did these Jews...but the challange is on you...to see if you will with hold on your FAITH.
  
  I recommend "Night" for anyone of any age to read. It is definitely an "Eye opening" experience that i am thankful to have come about.
  

• A Book for the Decades....  Jan 18, 2006 (28 of 31 found this helpful)

  Elie Wiesel's Night is truly a book for the decades. The emotional impact that this book creates can be overwhelming at times since you realize that Wiesel lived through one of the worst nightmares ever to grace the Earth. Somewhere deep inside us, there is a reservoir of determination, hope, and will that won't let us quit, no matter how horrendous the things around us. Few of us ever find it, but Wiesel did. He survived, and if his words can help one or two out there to survive trauma and darkness, then we can never thank him enough.
  
  I first read this book 14 years ago in high school and I cried when I finished. This book is that impactful. Brilliant choice.