Night (Oprah's Book Club)

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In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.

Book Description

A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Customer Reviews:

Night: A movie in a book!.......2007-10-17

Night is a memoir of Mr. Wiesel's horrible experience during the Holocaust. I read this book during my middle school years, and I vividly remembered one particular section of the book very clearly, even 10 years after I had read it. It is a section where Wiesel describes how a couple of German SS agents were hitting his father, because he was so weak to move. He recalls how he didn't even move a finger to help his father. Part of him even wished his father would die so that he didn't have to carry the burden of caring for his father.

The next morning, Wiesel awakened to see the empty bed of his father, whom had passed over night and been moved out early in the morning. This exeperience alone would haunt even the strongest human being and probably ruin anyone's possibility of even a remotely bright future. However, Eli Wiesel understands that the days of the Holocaust and WWII were not just any other days. They were days when human beings no longer acted like human beings. Pain, evil, and apathy ruled the Earth during this time.

This is certainly not the only section of the book that is graphic and almost too painful to read. The entire book is full of such events. It is extremely important for us to keep books and movies that re-tell the suffering of the Holocaust fresh in our mind so that we may never allow ourselves to comitt the same mistakes. Suffering of this magnitude should never, ever, ever, ever afflict any human beings ever again. Please buy and read this book, you will not regret it.

Note: I suggest reading this book along with the Diary of Anne Frank and watch Schindler's List. Together, they will offer you at least a small glimpse of the hell that was the Holocaust.

Powerful. No other word to describe it........2007-10-14

I read this book well before I found out it was on Oprah's book club. My tenth grade English teacher had us read it for her class when we did a segment on the Holocaust and do a report on it. Like everyone else in the class I was reluctant to read it mainly because this teacher was known for given out poor quality books on subjects that were either boring or not powerful enough. And usually when it comes to the Holocaust you can count on the book being good.

But this one surpassed the rest. Not only was it moving and an honest tear jerker but it was a quick read, one that could be read 50 times over and still never the power of the words. If you're in the mood for a good book that will tug at your heartstrings, pick this one up. He captures the Holocaust in a new, moving light and you'll never forget it.

I'm just upset that this book is now famous only because Oprah says it's "cool".

never forget.......2007-10-14

I don't think I can explain how much I love this book in ways that are as poetic or well-written as others have, but I had to add my two cents and make it known that this is a book that should not be missed. I read this book not long after Oprah did a special on it with the author, but yet I haven't forgotten anything that was written. That right there is the true gift that Elie Wiesel has given to each of us.

Don't read this book thinking you have to (maybe because Oprah told you to). You don't have to do anything to live except breathe. Read it so you can appreciate it and keep the memories of our world alive. It's our history, no one else's.

NIGHT.......2007-10-03

This new translation of NIGHT is not just a book, it's a gift. A gift of Elie Wiesel's memory, memory of such horrific atrocities committed against him, his family, and others. We can use this gift as a tool to evolve as a human race - or not.

Night.......2007-10-02

This book was both wonderful and disturbing. The translation was smooth and easy to read. The body of the book gives a further glimpse into the terrors of that war, and the suffering people had to endure; especially children. I finished this book in less than a day, and when I was done, I was able to appreciate my life even more, and be grateful for everthing I have.

Average customer rating:

A simple, succinct, harrowing story
incredible
Great book...influenced the epic
Night
Book CLub Book

Night
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Bantam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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ASIN: 0553272535
Release Date: 1982-03-01

Amazon.com

Book Description

Night -- A terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family...the death of his innocence...and the death of his God. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary Of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

Customer Reviews:

A simple, succinct, harrowing story.......2007-09-10

This is the true story of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. A religious Jew, Wiesel was a young boy during the German invasion. He and his family were taken captive by the Nazis and put into the concentration camps where he witnessed atrocities that destroyed his family and shattered his faith.

Told simply and succintly, this first person account is haunting. Wiesel speaks with a numb detachment, sensationalizing nothing. He asks for no pity. He simply describes what he saw.

It is only one person's point-of-view of perhaps the most important event in modern history, but his testimony feels as big as the Holocaust itself. That this is one of millions of stories that could be told is shocking again, even if you've seen movies or read other books on the topic. You come away from this book with a better understanding of what happened, and many unanswerable questions as to why it happened.

As other reviewers have suggested, this book should be required reading for all high school students.

incredible.......2007-08-23

This was amazing book. This book takes you on the journey of a Jewish boy during the Nazi reign. You may know the stories of the concentration camps but you really can't imagine what they felt like. I would recomend this book to any one.

Great book...influenced the epic.......2007-08-12

Read a book like this and it might influence you to write a concept piece.
By the way the title of this is Night not "darkness" Ted Leonard.

Night.......2007-07-09

The author is such a good writer that you'll almost hear the squeak of rusty railroad cars along with muffled sounds of hopelessness from within as they roll down the tracks to the concentration camps.

You can almost smell the odors of less than humane living conditions mingled with the acrid smoke from the crematoriums upon arriving at the death camps.

You'll almost be able to see the look of death in the eyes of the living who have given up as well as the emaciated bodies of those whose suffering had finally ceased.

You'll almost feel the nagging hunger pains of those who sometimes must go without food for days at a time and the bone-drilling cold ache of hands and feet not protected from the sub-zero temperatures.

But you'll also sense the author's strong will to persevere the inhumane cruelties inflicted upon his people to return to the land of the living one day. He did survive and tells his story in a non-fiction selection that reads like a novel.

"Night" by Elie Weisel relates the atrocities of the Holocaust through the eyes of a teenage Jewish boy. As in "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "Schindler's List", it's an unforgettable story that should never EVER be forgotten.

Book CLub Book.......2007-06-02

Great telling of a sad story, but factual and interesting. Enjoyed this book and shared it with others

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

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Night is moving
Life after Death.
Night and Dawn
The Night Trilogy-Elie Wiesel
Well written

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374521409

Book Description

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1960, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.

In the short novel Dawn (1961), a young man who has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine is apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang. Command to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage, the former victim becomes an executioner.

In The Accident, (1962), Wiesel again turns to fiction to question the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions."

Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence and on temptation of self-destruction.

A Hill & Wang Teacher's Guide is available for this title.

Customer Reviews:

Night is moving.......2006-07-02

This was one bound volume of Wiesel's first three books, which concern the Holocaust, survival, and humanity. Night is Wiesel's personal memoir, which relates his personal story before and during World War II, as he and his father are separated from his mother and sister and interned in a series of concentration camps. Dawn is the story of a member of the movement to free Palestine from British occupation and Day concerns how one could move from a past that consumes one's every thought (or even if one should).

Quote: "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

I read Night in high school, and always think of it as being a particularly long book, which it is not. Wiesel manages to pack more than I would think possible into a little over a hundred pages, which relates the story of himself and his family during the Holocaust. It is a beautifully written work that relates a terrible story. I found the story of Wiesel's loss of faith and the relationship he had with his father particularly memorable. If you somehow missed this in high school, pick it up, if you didn't, find it again. It's worth it. Dawn and Day are not as catching as the first work, but are still interesting in their own way.

Life after Death........2006-06-10

Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, for his tireless work in addressing the Holocaust, wrestling with its almost incomprehensible moral questions, and most importantly working to ensure that it never happens again. NIGHT, his memoir of his own experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was perhaps the earliest first-hand account to be widely published. Totally authentic, written in blood and tears, it quite defies criticism. To assign four, five, or even ten stars to it would be an obscenity.

And yet Wiesel followed NIGHT by two very short fictional works, novellas rather than novels, called DAWN and DAY. Clearly he wanted to explore issues that could not be addressed in a factual memoir. And these two later books are fascinating in showing Wiesel's first steps as a novelist, rapidly gaining confidence and skill. In this respect alone, I feel that criticism is indeed germane.

We all know the advice to writers: show, don't tell. You can see Wiesel encountering the issue even in NIGHT, which is a mixture of simply reported facts and personal reflection. When he is simply telling his own story, the facts stand by themselves, and even at this date reveal aspects of the Holocaust that I did not understand: for example, why the Jewish communities did not move more proactively to resist their fate, and details of the social interactions among the camp inmates themselves. Occasionally the personal reflections get in the way of relating events, and yet how else is the author to tackle his loss of faith and feelings of guilt which seem to have been a heavier burden than any physical indignities? Wiesel's answer was to turn to fiction.

In his preface to DAWN, Wiesel makes it clear that the protagonist, Elisha, is not the author himself, although he admits that it easily might have been, had he been sent to Palestine rather than France after his liberation from Buchenwald. The fictional Elisha is recruited by freedom fighters trying to oust the British and form the state of Israel. After taking part in several guerilla actions, he is ordered to execute a hostage, a British army captain, in reprisal for the hanging of a Jew. The whole of this slim volume takes place in the night before the execution, and poses the question of whether a man who has escaped the hands of killers can ever be justified in becoming a killer himself. The theme is clearly important, and once more topical, but I cannot say that it works as a novel. The fictional background is sketchy and seems constructed with the sole purpose of presenting this dilemma. A large section of the book is devoted to Elisha's dialogue with ghosts from this past, which further diminishes reality. After a few pages, Wiesel stops showing Elisha through his deeds and social interactions, and concentrates instead on the moral dilemma in his soul; in novelistic terms, the result is to reduce rather than enhance the character's humanity. The book thus comes over less as a novel than as a parable.

DAY (originally published in English as THE ACCIDENT), Wiesel's second attempt at writing a fictional sequel to NIGHT is altogether more successful. This is partly because its theme is less absolute and more subtle: the difficulty of returning to a full loving life for somebody who has lived so long in the realm of death. His quasi-autobiographical protagonist (Eliezer, but the name is mentioned only once) is a rounded character with much depth. The book follows him as he recovers in a New York hospital from a near-fatal encounter with a taxicab. Although we still hear his inner thoughts, his situation is shown primarily in terms of his very real relationships with others, particularly his lover Kathleen. He has clearly led a varied and somewhat successful life in the dozen years since his liberation, but, though no longer a loner in practical matters, he still retains a huge void in his heart. Wiesel introduces quite a lot of psychological suspense, and has the wisdom not to make the ending too facile; if there is healing to come, it will still be a long process.

I have not (yet) read any of Elie Wiesel's later novels. Judging by the speed with which he ascends the learning-curve as a fiction writer here, I would expect them to be increasingly filled out in human terms -- perhaps even to the point where he might have been a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Night and Dawn.......2006-03-05

I was given the first two stories of the trilogy to read in my Nazi Germany and the Holocaust class this year and found them to be excellently written and very meaningful. With the help of an excellent teacher who posed all the right questions I was allowed to see the full meaning of these two stories.

I wasn't able to read the Accident, as my teacher chose for us to read the Sunflower by Simon Weinsenthal instead, although I do hope to someday.

Night and Dawn are two great stories which should be read by all.

The Night Trilogy-Elie Wiesel.......2006-02-17

This was one of the most moving book(s) I have ever read. Everyone should read this at some point in their lives

Well written.......2006-02-17

I thought this was a well written memoir and as hard as it was to read it is something that should be read by every living person. We need to step up and not allow this to happen in any country and it is so sad to see it happening everywhere. When will we learn our lessons?

Night, Dawn, and Day (B'Nai B'Rith Judaica Library)

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Night/Dawn/Day
The Fire! The Furnace! Look, over there!
The most emotional account of the Holocaust

Night, Dawn, and Day (B'Nai B'Rith Judaica Library)
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Jason Aronson
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Night/Dawn/Day.......2006-04-11

The Fire! The Furnace! Look, over there!.......2000-06-01

The cries of a madwoman on an Auschwitz-bound cattle car are just one of many portents shepherding doomed souls on their way to Nazi furnaces. In "Night", the first of three books in this collection, Elie Wiesel recounts his deportation to the death camps where the rest of his family perished. The tragic weight of his witness to this obscene cruelty burdens the reader with the fates of the inmates and his reflections on the meaning of evil. Wiesel questions his god and his faith. He sees sons kill fathers: "Meir. Meir, my boy! Don't you recognize me? I'm your father... you're hurting me... you're killing your father! I've got some bread... for you too... for you too..." (p.106), and becomes intimate with death.

In "Dawn", Wiesel has migrated to Palestine and faces the duty to execute a captured prisoner. His long night of contemplation and uncertainty exposes his preoccupation with killing and killers and again with death: "Death," Kalman, the grizzled master, told me, "is a being without arms or legs or mouth or head; it is all eyes. If ever you meet a creature with eyes everywhere, you can be sure that it is death." (p.140). It is a preoccupation to be squeezed only from one who has not fully lost his faith or his humanity. A beggar explains the face of the night: "Listen," he said, digging his fingers into my arm. "I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." (p.126) Fear, night, suffering, and evil are his companions, and he explores them constantly. "Being afraid is nothing. Fear is only a color, a backdrop, a landscape." (p.174).

Until, in "Day", he survives a terrible accident and is faced with his own complacent acceptance of mortality. He struggles with the urge to explain to his talented young doctor the futility of fighting against death, and reaches an epiphany when he understands the tragedy of splashing others with his suffering. "Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul - and worse, the souls of your friends - for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep." (p.247).

These stories are powerful and frightening,. Death is an implacable enemy, but also a partner for life who never goes away and will always win in the end. Wiesel has stared at evil, his stories are wrenching.

The most emotional account of the Holocaust.......2000-04-25

This book should simply be read by everyone interested in Judiasm or the Holocaust. Just read it!

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Night
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck Centennial Edition)

ASIN: 0140060286

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Night, Dawn, the Accident: A Trilogy
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0809073692

Book Description

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Night is one of the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. First published in 1960, it is the autobiographical account of an adolescent boy and his father in Auschwitz. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.

In the short novel Dawn (1961), a young man who has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine is apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang. Command to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage, the former victim becomes an executioner.

In The Accident, (1962), Wiesel again turns to fiction to question the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions."

Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence and on temptation of self-destruction.

A Hill & Wang Teacher's Guide is available for this title.

Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics (Nature's Meaning)

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Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics (Nature's Meaning)
John Hart
Manufacturer: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0742546055

Book Description

The increasing awareness of environmental issues as ultimately moral issues has led to the intersection of religion and environment. Sacramental Commons presents a unique way of looking at this topic by relating the Christian word sacrament (signs of divine presence) to the term commons (shared place and shared goods, among people and between people and the natural world), suggesting that local natural settings and local communities can be a source for respect and compassion.

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Night: With Connected Readings
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Pearson Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn & the Accident
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Night: With Related Readings (Emc Masterpiece Series Access Editions)

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Night: With Related Readings (Emc Masterpiece Series Access Editions)
Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: EMC/Paradigm Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0821924184

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