5 comments about The Life of David.

1. A challenge to digest perhaps for the intellectual lazy,but well worth the effort. As some one already summed " About a Poet,For a Poet,By a Poet" In short Mr. Pinsky, Bravo!



2. All you could ever want to know about David and a little more...Fascinating insight and information such as the fact that David may have been/probably was related to Goliath...
   
   It's a shame it couldn't have been presented in a more readable style. That diminishes the book, but doesn't offset the value of reading the book to learn more about David, one of the Bible's most intriguing, most human characters.
   
   Still, the best discripton of David comes from the Psalms, one not written by him: "He ruled with integrity of heart..."
   
   Doesn't say he was a perfect person or that he was anything but human...but he had "integrity of heart..." That says a lot about David's life condition and, we hope, ours, too.



3. This book was very disappointing. It was written in a stream of consciousness style with bizarre attempts to integrate modern analogies and to compare David to modern figures from unrelated fields. I had the feeling that it was written in one weekend without the scholarly research for which I would have hoped.



4. This is in a way a surprising work. One would have expected a poet like Pinsky to have somehow concentrated on the work which was the Jewish Tradition attributes to King David, the work which is arguably the greatest body of religious poetry ever written, Tehiilim( Psalms). Instead Pinsky retells the whole story of David chronlogically.He retells the story and often artfully reinterprets it .He does this by making wide-ranging and often telling literary comparisons. In the course of this he rejects a basic apologetic line which sees David only as king of virtue, and ancestor of the Messiah to come. He tries instead to see David whole in all his flawed greatness.
   In the course of reading this work I learned much about David some of which I should have known about before. I believe that the great share of readers will find much to learn here not only about David, but about the Biblical world of which he is a part.
   Nonetheless there are essential perhaps most essential elements in the life of David , that I believe are not fully treated here. Above all David's relation to G-d , a relation so intensely and powerfully given in Tehillim is not really studied here.



5. Reading Robert Pinsky's work, one finds great difficulty placing the book in any particular genre. Biographic analysis of biblical characters seems something of a rage at the moment, some excellent, some not. "The Life of David," however, does not fit well with the genre. Unlike the Biblical scholar Baruch Halperin's brilliant "David's Secret Demons" Pinsky eschews footnotes or deep textual analysis. Instead, taking a poet's view, we see here a sort of emotional/artistic portrait of this most complex of biblical characters. Some may find frustrating the way the author moves over the story often moving down strange tangents only to circle back later.
   
   To call the prose of a former laureate poetic may seem odd, but one must consider how well Pinsky textures his words. Perhaps given David's own poetic nature, only one who shared his great love of language could bring the King of Israel to life. While the trip may on occasion grow strange, those who wish to deepen their understanding of King David will find much here to give food for thought.

5 comments about Swimming Up the Sun: A Memoir of Adoption.

1. Very interesting and realistic twist on the adoption search story. The author doesn't sugarcoat anything, and produces a nice mix of humor and deep emotion.
   
   Characters are realistic, which is fitting because this is a memoir, not fiction. But it's very hard to convey a realistic view of family members. Hats off to Nicole Burton for that.
   
   Needs a little editing, otherwise 5 stars.



2. This book rivals some of the best mystery novels. The reader accompanies Nicole Burton as she solves the mystery of who her parents are and describes the relationships she forms with them. The book was sensitive, insightful, and beautifully written. Although it was a serious subject, I found the book witty and humorous. It was a pleasure accompanying her on this adventure.



3. This is a very eloquent and heartfelt account of one woman's search and reunion. The author provides a very moving and well-written account of the events surrounding her search for her birth family and the ensuing reunions and relations. She honestly portrays the feelings and relationships that occured for her. I would highly recommend this book to anyone touched by adoption.



4. Nicole has written a heartfelt, honest account of the complex needs, tensions, and feelings of all the members of a biological family involved in adoption. As an adoptive mother, I especially appreciated the open and sensitive account of an adoptee's search and her emotional roller coaster as she sought to connect with her biological family. I highly recommend this book to all those already involved in adoption, or who are considering an adoption. Adoptees' needs are an important aspect of the situation, and Nicole presents this perspective simply and eloquently.



5. Swimming Up the Sun is a touching and well-written story that reveals the wonderful and agonizing complexity of family relationships. The writer demonstrates grace and wit in her portrayals and inspires empathy in her readers. Though I have never been involved in an adoption, I found the story poignant and deeply relevant, especially at a time when fewer and fewer families resemble traditional family models.

5 comments about Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943.

1. I'll read this book over and over, I am sure - three times already in a day and a half. The first time I tried to focus on the historical scholarship and impeccable method, but was distracted by thoughts of "But why? Why? It doesn't make sense. They were Germans too."
   
   Again I read it, and was arrested this time by the mechanistic system set up by the Nazis in what was really quite a short time. Every Jew's (and every other citizen's) address was on a card somewhere - every detail of their life was a part of a huge network by means of which all people of a certain category could be swept up with little or no warning with chilling efficiency, and sent away. Then their property was listed, valued, distributed to 'more deserving' citizens, and the state itself recovered every last drop of value from those it had discarded - down to retrieving their security deposits from the gas and electricity companies to be paid into general revenue. Those companies even printed for their own use forms for particularising the amount of the deposit, any unrecovered bills, and any remainder to be sent to the State.
   
   Then, at the third attempt little Marion and her family took all my attention, despite my efforts to resist them, and I wept. This book is quite accessible to any general reader, and Marion Samuel, thanks to the efforts of Gotz Aly, could take her place beside Anne Frank in the lists of books for young folk to read, for slightly different reasons. Anne Frank shows us her own growth and maturity, as well as the effect on others of the horror outside their hiding place. Marion's story is not in her won words, but it shows starkly the power a state apparatus can gather to itself and use to crush parts of its population it takes a dislike to. Would that there had been more of the kind of German described in "Into the tunnel" when a young girl was told forcefully by her father that the sight of Jews being deported was something that struck home at all other Germans, because it could be Catholics like their family next.



2. One of the abiding insights that comes through in Goetz Ally's Into the Tunnel is just how efficient bureaucracies can be at transforming vibrantly alive human beings into impersonal statistics on official forms. In their extermination program, the Nazis, with an eerie fidelity to record-keeping, felt the need to document every detail of the lives they were destroying. That's why Aly is able to trace the unhappy fate of the beautiful little girl, Marion Samuel, who is the protagonist of this unhappy tale.
   
   Such exercises are important; they help to keep memory alive. But Aly's book is more of a model of historical research than a sustained biography that captures who Marion Samuel was. This is as it must be. Nazi documentation records dates when the Samuel family loses its business, moves from one locale to another, and is rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz, but little else. There are few photographs left, and family memories on both Cilly's (Marion's mother) and Ernst's (her father) side have dimmed (or were outright obliterated by the Holocaust). So what we have in this book is a lot of data that leaves us with the sinking awareness that the 12-year old Marion simply disappeared in a wide ocean of bureaucratic files and forms even before she was murdered and incinerated at Auschwitz.
   
   Still, we get glimpses of her, and those glimpses are all the more poignant for being so incomplete. One of her schoolmates recalls that in 1938, a full five years before her murder, an 8-year old Marion was already feeling the burden of the Nazi horror. She remembers (p. 82) that at one point a near-hysterical Marion blurted out her fear that Jews were disappearing into an ominous tunnel. We also know that at the final roundup, Marion was separated for three full days from her parents, and sent to a detention warehouse full of equally parentless children. Marion's mother, Cilly, was sent on to Auschwitz and quite likely was immediately murdered. Marion and her father Ernst were reunited in the same transport that took them both to Auschwitz. One can only imagine the forlornness Marion experienced before she was reunited with her father for their final journey into the tunnel. Both were murdered a week later.
   
   It's good that Aly's work allows us to know something of a child, unspeakably murdered before she barely had a chance to live, who otherwise would've totally disappeared.



3. this was a very moving book. I kept thinking during the book. how could anybody murder 1.5 million children and where were the alleged good people. why did not our country do a great deal more to save the jews of europe. the USA could have saved every jew in germany, austria and czechoslovakia if the state dept. had not been run by anti-semetic officials.



4. This is a book could've been written by Sophie Scholl, from the White Rose Movement, from heaven-almighty.
   
   I cannot bequeath the tragic nature of how I came to understand this "statistic" but in all due seriousness, why not a statistical analysis of the nearly 2 million dead or wounded, you have to remember, that Iraq and Aftanistan, although it maims, scars and is a horrifying Nazi conquest, particularly Iraq, the Holy Roman Empire lives on, just as the slaughter continues, for all Buddhist protesters in Tibet, and anyone with half a brain, can figure this out: this book is a euphemism for the hatred that sparks wars and all sorts of pogroms, including that of being disabled, very similar to being Jewish, in Nazi Germany.
   
   I highly hated Hitler, until he dies, briefly, very briefly with enough time I have to commute across the internet to show my mother this beautiful book, but I hate him present-tense, as I have no money, to buy it for her.



5. Marion Samuel was eleven years old when she arrived at Auschwitz in March of 1943, she was gassed to death the same day and her body burned in the crematorium. He ashes were thrown into a pit with hundreds of others and then covered over with soil. Their is no marker over where she died.
   
   But who was this child and what was her crime that she should be treated so. She came from a lower middle class family from West Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea where the German-Polish border is today. At the age of six she was a witness to Kristallnacht and forbidden to go to the German Public School she had attended for the last three years. He family lost their business and both her parent's became "unskilled" factory workers. Marion was able to go to a "Jewish" school for two more years, before those were shut down. For the last years of her life she lived in a one room ground floor apartment off an alley. Since her parent's were away each day, she had to fill her time as best she could.
   
   How did she view the world she lived in? Did she wonder why she and her parents were being treated the way they were? Did she have any understanding that she was being punished for a random act of birth? At least we know she was on the same train as her father (who lasted sixty one days in the camp) when she was "evacuated". Thankfully, the horrors at the end for this little girl were tempered by the comfort of a parent.
   
   Hopefully, the people that ordered her death, and carried it out, suffered for what they did.

4 comments about The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story (Holocaust).

1. This is a very nice book about a little-known story from WWII. It is just incredible what these Jewish families were able to endure to stay alive by hiding in caves, although none of them were experienced cavers. The story of the modern-day cave experts who rediscovered the story is also well done, and the two tales are woven beautifully to create the book. Modern cave photographs and historical images work combine to help tell the story.



2. A book that should be read by all Holocaust-denyers. Had the privelage of meeting the authors and one of the family members written about.



3. Two authors, a cave expert and a photographer, tell this almost unbelievable story of how thirty-eight Jews from a village in the Ukraine survived the Holocaust. They clung tenaciously to life in two different caves for over one year, and somehow managed to come out of the experience physically, mentally, and emotionally intact. We feel admiration and empathy for these determined people who risked everything in order to stay together.
   The story of the caves is interwoven with the story of these people's survival. The authors conducted extensive interviews and consulted the memoir, We Fight to Survive, written in 1960 by Esther Stermer, the matriarch of one of the families. This book reads like an adventure story with a suspense-filled plot and fascinating characters. However, this is brutal fact, not artificial fiction. Generous margins, gorgeous photos of the people and places involved, accurate maps and fascinating sidebars make for a handsome book. The only elements lacking are an index and bibliography. One of the survivors, Shulim Stermer, states: "Everyone has it inside of them to survive." Peter Taylor wondered if he would be capable of the same will to fight for his own family's survival. The Secret of Priest's Grotto brings us face to face with this difficult question. Ages 10-14.



4. I visited the Priest's Grotto in 1990 and found the story local cavers told us fascinating. However it took the amazing detective work of Cris Nicola to uncover the entire story of survival. The book accurately conveys the cave environment and the conditions found there. Cris and Peter are able to put this into language that non caver types can understand. The book had special meaning to me as I am one of few Americans to actually visit the site. To anyone this story is a moving example of a family fighting to survive under horrible conditions. The photo of the present day family on page 61 brought tears to my eyes. I highly reccomend giving this book a read.

5 comments about Memories of Survival.

1. powerful book as well as the added gift of fiber art that the writer used to illustrate her experiences



2. This book is a testament to art as an expression of pain and redemption.
   It is original and beautifully executed.



3. I saw the panels on which this book is based at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and wished at the time that there was a book. When it came out I made a special effort to get it. Esther Krinitz spent years creating these works of art to illustrate the story of her experience, and the combination of her drive to communicate with her obvious enjoyment of creating surely makes hers a uniquely life-affirming voice recounting the terrible tragedy faced by her family and beyond them, her people, her country, and all humankind. For young people, the details are both strange and familiar, commonplace and unthinkable. They will relate to the young woman's independent streak as well as her affection for her family and grief at losing almost all of them. I look forward to sharing it with the young people in my life.



4. In this outstanding book are displayed thirty-six embroidered pictures that the author began at the age of fifty, to illustrate the stories of her childhood in Poland and her survival during the Holocaust. When she died at the age of seventy-four, she wasn't finished, but she left this remarkable book. Her daughter Bernice used her mother's comments to write the text. It is amazing how much Esther remembered, which is evidenced in the intricate details and vibrant colors of the needlework. Each full-page picture is framed in a different color, with Esther's comments under it and the text on the opposite page. The deceptively simple pictures have the look of folk art in contrast to a grimly realistic story. At the end, there is a poignant page titled "To Germany," where Esther has joined the Polish Army in March 1945 and she shows us in it what she remembers so many years later: seeing Nazi officers hanging from every tree as they passed along the road of an earlier battle with the Russians on their way to Berlin. The last frame shows Esther landing at Ellis Island, viewing the Statue of Liberty. She was very excited, because she felt that this meant she would never again be persecuted for being Jewish. Her daughter Bernice calls this a memorial to her mother's family, because of them all, only Esther and a sister survived the war. Esther's daughters Bernice and her sister have founded a nonprofit educational organization called Art and Remembrance, which is dedicated to using the power of story and art to illuminate the effects of war, intolerance, and social injustice. This book is highly recommended for all collections, as Esther's story brings these terrible times alive in a way that adds a different dimension to children's understanding of the Holocaust. For ages 12 - adult.
   Reviewed by Andrea Davidson



5. I picked up this book at the school where I teach on the advice of our librarian and I am so very glad I did! The stories woven in the embroidered panels speak volumes about what Esther Nisenthal and her family endured during the horror of the Holocaust. Her use of color is astonishing, and the fact that she actually embroidered the words to her story onto the cloths just makes the whole experience seem so much more real and personal. This book is a moving tribute to all who perished and survived this evil time. This is an amazing book. Highly, highly recommended.

5 comments about The Diary of Anne Frank..

1. Please note that Amazon does provide a box to the right of the selection list of documents that you may use to narrow your search parameters. I was looking for the play, so I chose the "entertainment" option. Also present in the box were "novel", "history" and a number of other options. It's a little confusing to navigate at first, but the more you use Amazon the better you'll understand how it works.



2. I just received this in the mail to give to my niece and discovered that it is written as a play. The Amazon description does not mention any thing about it being a play. Arggh! Frustrating.



3. They really should write better item descriptions. This is a play not a novel. Unable to return just wasted a bunch of money.



4. Online Reader-
   After having just read this book for an English assiment I have only just now realized how much a War can do to someone.
   I admit to crying throughout the book, and while reading I was heartbroken to hear of all of the misfortune that befell these inocent people. And to think that one man-Hitler-could cause all of this pain and misery made me insanly angry at him, and ashamed for all of those who followed him blindly.
   In this book, and young girl Anne, and her family, as well as another family and Mr. Dussel, (seven people in all) went into hiding from the Nazis for TWO YEARS.
   I feel so sorry for them that having not to breathe fresh air for two years, and to be cramped up with many people for two years, and the end result was being killed by the Nazis. I am so glad, however, that we now have her diary, and realize and know so much more about the Holocaust and all of the people who had to endure it's brutalness.



5. This is not the book so be careful if you order this - it is the written play of "The Diary of Anne Frank". Now I have to send it back for a refund - this could have been avoided if Amazon has a number you can call and talk to a person and get a better description of the book.

No comments about The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home.

No comments about Last Days in Babylon: The Exile of Iraq's Jews, the Story of My Family.

4 comments about Anne Frank: Life in Hiding.

1. This book is magical, because it shows you and makes you feel like you are the scene. It made me think how hard it would be to live like a young Jewish girl called Anne Frank living a life with guns being shot and having to move so much.
   I can not imagine living like Anne that can only go to shops that have the Jewish signs, and not much of the stores had them. Anne was very brave to put up with this stuff every day. She is unbelievable, she was a great person. You should read this book because it can give you information and show how lucky we are that we have freedom to go anywhere we want to go.
   I had a lot of fun reading this book and it showed me how lucky I am to be here in the United States. This book also taught me how cruel Hitler was to the Jewish and other people.



2. This book is filled with the ups and downs of Anne Frank, how she handles her problems, how life was being Jewish and happy memories of her life. It tells how Anne was a very energetic girl who had fun with friends and was very social. However, it also describes how hard life was for her, being Jewish, going into hiding and being captured and being transported to different concentration camps. Anne was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt Germany. During her time in hiding she kept all her secret thoughts in a diary that her mother and father (Edith and Otto Frank) gave to her the day she turned 13(June 12, 1942). Anne had a very strong bond with her father and sister (Margot) but not as strong with her mother but she still loved her dearly. This is a wonderful book and I recommend it to anyone who is interested about Anne Frank.



3. The summary on this book is this is a book about Anne Frank. It tells about her life and her diary. Also it tells about her troubles and her problems. In this book, people are put into concentration camps and poision gas room by the Nazis. If you don't know who the Nazis are, they are a type of group that dosen't like Jews.
   Anne was born in 1856.Anne was very adventrous. She liked to write, so at the age of 13, her mom and dad bought her a diary. Anne was very talkative. Sha always got into trouble.
   Some problems that she faced is hidding.She was hidding from the Nazis. She was hidding with another family and a dentist. Also another problem she faced is physical changes.
   Some ways she solved her problems is by writting in her diary. In her diary she would write about things that were going on in her life. Another way she solved her problem is by hidding. This is a problem solver because if she didn't she would be in a concentration camp.



4. This is another book about Anne Frank that I get the chance to read. Although there are many biographies about this wonderful human being, this book is the closest one that can answer the questions that all Anne Frank fan has. I did for many years just read the Diary over and over but I wanted more! This book is definetly more! It tells you more about the relationship she had with her family and the rest of the people in hiding. This is a girl who could hardly see the light coming from her window and the only green thing that she could think about was a huge chestnut outside the Annex. This book describes this little things that she cherished and that she no longer had....her freedom. She didn't either had freedom of speach inside the Annex due to the critics about her attitude. This book develops more information about why Anne acted like she did and why she had an open opinion about everything. It also gives you a bigger idea of why she didn't like her mother and develops more about her childhood around her family and her friends. I hope all readers that enjoy the Anne Frank writings will enjoy this description about her persona. Is a total different thing to read her diary knowing more about her life and early aspirations. ENJOY!

No comments about The Mogul: Eddie Gottlieb, Philadelphia Sports Legend and Pro Basketball Pioneer.