Finally getting around to Love in the Time of Cholera. It's just on the nose enough.
Finally getting around to Love in the Time of Cholera. It's just on the nose enough.
"I never argue with people who say baseball is boring, because baseball is boring. And then, suddenly, it isn't. And that's what makes it great." - Joe Posnanski
We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective ~ Kurt Vonnegut
cumberlandreds (04-06-2020),Rojo (04-02-2020)
"Man's Search for Meaning" by Victor Frankle.
If you want to read a book about the Holocaust, read this. Frankle went to the camps to save his parents.
Elie Wiesel is a phony. Forget "Night". That's bourgie crap.
Last edited by Rojo; 04-02-2020 at 03:41 AM.
Wasn’t sure who Wiesel was so looked him up:
Grow up.In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary, which extended the Holocaust into that country.[a] Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family, along with the rest of the town's Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where up to 90 percent of the people were killed on arrival.[15]
Immediately after they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were murdered.[15] Wiesel and his father were selected to perform labor so long as they remained able-bodied, after which they were to be killed in the gas chambers.
What would you say.....ya do here?
Going back to the old catalog in our house, reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Next Reds manager, second shooter. --Confirmed on Redszone.
Roy Tucker (07-10-2020)
Wow, I'm just blown away by this. Elie Wiesel brought the Holocaust to millions of kids, something I view as critical in keeping the notion of "Never again" alive.
Definitely not crap, in my opinion. I'm not sure how a person who went to a concentration camp and then wrote about it could ever be called a phony, no matter what one thinks of the story they told.
I may not know enough about Wiesel; I do know some of his views on Israel were controversial, but that's probably for the politics thread.
Last edited by SunDeck; 04-09-2020 at 01:28 PM.
Next Reds manager, second shooter. --Confirmed on Redszone.
I never get a book and read it. I add books to the theme I'm on as my theme morphs itself through my life. It's like putting a puzzle together that is a billion pieces and I work on one section at a time, trying to gather enough pieces together of as accurate of information as possible so I can get the least foggiest picture of what current feelings and understanding of the time and place were at the time. There are always reference books and reference maps, such as Commager's "Documents of American History" and Adams' "Atlas of American History", Lunt's "History of England", etc., where the internet simply doesn't help. I rarely get through ten pages of any of the books where I don't look up cross-references of the information to get an even better understanding of what the authors are sharing. I read all footnotes and references.
So, currently, the theme I am on is 1600-1750, U.S. and England. It's engulfing. I break away from it occasionally with an off-topic book, but try not to get away for too long.
Last edited by Kingspoint; 04-18-2020 at 06:03 PM.
"One problem with people who have no vices is that they're pretty sure to have some annoying virtues."
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07...esels-night-2/
The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn’t historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in recent weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world’s leading authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to be the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.
If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Night doesn’t make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.
The book that became Night was originally a much longer account, published in Yiddish in 1956, under the title Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). Wiesel was living in Paris at the time. By 1958 he had translated his book from Yiddish into French, publishing it in that year under the title La Nuit. Wiesel says it was severely cut down in length by Jerome Lindon, the chief editor at Editions de Minuit. In 1960 came the English translation, Night, published by Hill & Wang. The 2006 edition of Night is translated from the 1958 French version by Wiesel’s wife, Marion, and in the introduction Wiesel says he has “been able to correct and revise a number of important details”.
Last edited by Rojo; 04-19-2020 at 12:26 AM.
I'm not interested in a "larger" truth if it's not the actual truth. As to the holocaust, the actual truth is horrific enough.
The memoir genre is full of embellished accounts. And the Holocaust memoir section suffers from the same scrutiny ( are you familiar with the phrase “there’ no business like Shoah business”) As does substance abuse memoirs, and women’s memoirs.
That does not stop their popularity and their impact on people.
Similar criticisms have been leveled at Anne Frank’s Diary (embellishment of events)and Victor Frankl (spent only four days at Auschwitz, in transit).
I was a child when I read all three and didn’t know (or even consider) there was a question about their “actual” truth.
I found Night to be revelatory, because I was beginning to learn about the Holocaust (I am still learning about it) and I remember it’s raw, visceral quality. I don’t find it phony, even after learning about some disputed accuracies.
Last edited by Betterread; 04-19-2020 at 04:59 AM.
'Catch 22" by Joseph Heller
Unbelievable wordsmith and perfectly crazy story for today's world.
We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective ~ Kurt Vonnegut
RichRed (05-03-2020),Roy Tucker (07-10-2020),WildcatFan (04-20-2020)
The author of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", the most famous WWII War Correspondant....made the term famous embellished all of his articles, including flat out lying about his personal views. When his real diaries were discovered it was found that he sympathized with the Nazi's even after their invasion of Poland, which means he was sympathizing with them for years and years throughout their atrocities throughout Germany. He flipped his public opinions to make himself look like he was an enemy within because it made him look good to the Western World. It was always about his job and what would make him the most money. He could care less about the suffering of the people at the hands of the Nazis until it was a popular thing to do.
"One problem with people who have no vices is that they're pretty sure to have some annoying virtues."
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari's followup to Sapiens.
Really brilliant and thought provoking.
We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine by Gail Honeyman.
The novel focuses on 29-year-old Eleanor Oliphant, a social misfit with a traumatic past who becomes enamored of a singer, whom she believes she is destined to be with. The book deals with themes of isolation and loneliness, and depicts Eleanor's transformation journey towards a fuller understanding of self and life.
Pretty good read. Being in IT, I encounter a lot of these kind of people. Plus I was probably like that in my early 20’s.
She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning
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