An autobiographical narrative, in which the author describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps.
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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Honest and True -- Very, *Very* Powerful:
The quote from the New York Times on the cover of this book has it exactly right: "a slim volume of terrifying power." Wiesel's retelling of his experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp is concise and seemingly artless. But the absence of sentimental pathos only makes the story so much more moving, so much more powerful. I first listened to this novel as an audio book some five or six years ago, and the experience was overwhelming. Since then, I've listened to it again perhaps five times, I've read... more info
Darkly Revelatory:
When a teenager, Elie Wiesel was taken from his home, and he and his family were put in a series of concentration camps over several years. Night is the haunting record of that experience, as bleakly unflinching a memoir as has ever been written. Few can know the horrors of not only spending teenage years in such a place but also seeing family members and many others die and countless others suffer. Needless to say, Wiesel's own plight was also tragically great, and he unsurprisingly lost both innocence and... more info
Powerful!:
THis book was very powerful and moving while at the same time disturbing. I had my children read it. I want them to really understand what took place during the Holocaust and to see the resilence of people. This should be required reading in history class.
pretty good book:
The beginning of this book bored me so it took me about 1 1/2 hours to read the first chapter. I was surprised that Elie described everything with lots of detail. It also surprised how brutal people were during the Holocaust. In the end I thought this was a pretty good book and would recommend it to anyone willing to learn a lot about the Holocaust.