Customer Reviews

Being Frank With Anne

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The key term in education today is "differentiation." It holds that educators must provide alternate avenues of learning outside of the textbook. When I challenge my students with a writing assignment it's inevitable that a few will ask to create a poem instead of the typical essay. Once I grant permission I instantly hear other students flip their pages over and abandon their nearly-finished first paragraphs. The point being: Students connect with poetry.

I am a middle school teacher in an urban district and during our final assessments, when students are given the option to write an essay from several topics learned throughout the year, the overwhelming majority choose to write about the Holocaust.

With that, I am glad that someone finally created a book combining two of the typical student's favorite areas of learning. Most students won't randomly pick up a copy of "The Diary of Anne Frank" because it's 300+ pages. However, when a student is inspired and curious, obstacles cease to exist.

That's what "Being Frank with Anne" offers. A stimulating collection of poems based on the interpretation of Anne's diary, this book provides bite-sized insights into what it was like living in the Secret Annex for two years. This eloquently written book serves as the perfect diving board into the most significant event of our past century.

Michael James D'Amato, author of "The Classroom"

In Being Frank With Anne, Phyllis Johnson sets The Diary of Anne Frank to music in the most touching and sensitive ways, expressing the joys and the sorrows of a young girl in confinement along with those around her. Each poem generally stays to under a page, capturing the essence of a diary entry for a particular day in densely packed lines of meaning. The fear of being discovered is expressed in such lines as "Your heart hammers/ out a rhythmic / thank you for /not being / discovered / one more time." Her longing for freedom in the tense moments of an air raid is interpreted as"[an] itch for / freedom and / fleas, amidst / teeth clenching, / tear jerking air raids." Again, reflecting on the whole situation, "Optimism and pessimism / fly side-by-side, like a twin engine jet. / Will it suck in a bird / of conflict / and crash?" I read the Diary in school over twenty years ago, but these poems brought back the emotions I felt the day I read it, with the addition of a lyrical beauty that an excellent poet like Phyllis Johnson could deliver. Highly recommended.
Robert H. Sarkissian, author of The Wind Coughed At Dawn

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne Frank, received a book she had shown her father in a shop window a few days earlier. Although it was an autograph book, bound with red-and-green plaid cloth and with a small lock on the front, Anne decided she would use it as a diary.

In "Being Frank with Anne" Phyllis Johnson, brings us new insight on Anne Frank, and her short-lived life. Taking an entry from Anne Frank's personal diary "Kitty" Johnson, gives us the poetic take on what happened on that day, in Anne Frank's life. Being a fourteen year old girl, myself, I can relate to Anne, and her feelings of being misunderstood, and wanting to achieve the greater things that life has to offer.
In this beautifully, written collection of poems, you will feel pain; when Anne feels pain. You will feel longing; when Anne is yearning for something that is not in her reach. And you will feel happiness; in the moments that Anne felt any happiness at all. Phyllis Johnson gives us this book with over one hundred, heartfelt poems that will touch you deep inside, and leave you with a new understanding and perspective on what emotion was behind that diary entry, so many years ago. This book is a must have for any fan of Anne Frank, Phyllis Johnson, Poetry, or just the love of an all-around great book. You will not be sorry you read this book. You will be grateful to have read a book about something as important and touching, as Anne Frank.


"I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write ..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent...
And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ... I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me! When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?"

Anne Frank, wrote, on Wednesday, 5 April 1944,

Yes, Anne. You did write something great. And Phyllis Johnson keeps your voice going for many years to come.

-Angel Snyder,

Frank about Phyllis Johnson's Being Frank With Anne

When I, Barbara Drucker Smith, finished reading both The Diary of Anne Frank and Being Frank With Anne, I was in tears. What a masterful job Phyllis Johnson did with Being Frank With Anne. It is poignant and captures the essence succinctly of the longer works of Anne Frank's entries from The Diary of Anne Frank with meaningful and beautiful poetic expression. Congratulations to the Phyllis Johnson on this exquisite book. First I read the original entry of Anne Frank and then immediately read the poem of Johnson's on that entry. And on and on that way throughout the entire reading endeavor. What a splendid way to appreciate both volumes. This made for a poweful and meaningful experience -- a double whammy so to speak. Being Frank with Anne is an extraordinary book and perfect companion to The Diary of Anne Frank. I heartily recommend Being Frank With Anne.

What a great book of poems Phyllis Johnson has conceived in Being Frank with Anne, and what a wonderful resource guide to use when reading Diary of a Young Girl. This small book of poems, chronicled as they are to match the dates in Anne's diary, gives us a chance again to think about the days that were spent in that hidden space by Anne Frank, and to see through Phyllis Johnson's eyes, the impact this young life had on her as a small girl reading about Anne many years later. This work speaks again through Johnson's voice, "It haunted me as a young girl and spoke to me for years," she tells us in the foreword to her book. Phyllis Johnson's work shows us once again that we cannot look away and we must always remember what happened in that Annex in Amsterdam, Holland starting in 1942 and ending with Anne Frank's death in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Phyllis Johnson has done a courageous and outstanding job of asking us to focus again on a young girl named Anne Frank, and the memory she left behind for all of us. Being Frank with Anne is a book of poems that should be read by everyone..

Nancy Powell, author of How Far Is Ordinary, is Vice President of Eastern region of Poetry Society of Virginia

In this beautiful slim volume, Phyllis Johnson responds as reader and writer to one of the most powerful and influential diaries of our time. Powerful poetry responds to powerful prose; the heart of the reader responds in writing to the heart of the writer. While reading this book I couldn't help but envision classrooms filled with readers using this text as a model for their own writing responses. What a wonderful book! What a wonderful classroom resource!

In 1942 a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam moved with her family into a tiny secret annex above her father's office. Over the next two years the young teenager and her family hid from the German Nazis in an unsuccessful attempt to wait out the war safe from the horrors of the concentration camps. Throughout her time in hiding, Anne recorded events of daily life, hopes, dreams and sheer frustration in her valued diary. After twenty-five months of hiding, the Frank family was discovered and sent to concentration camps where Anne would die of typhus at the age of fifteen, just two months before the end of World War II.

Published in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the world's most read book and has captivated is audiences for generations. Rare is the young girl who cannot relate to some of the dreams and hopes that Anne writes of or the frustrations of growing up. Rare also is the one in this generation who can relate to and fully understand the horror of what the Franks were hiding from.

Phyllis Johnson's new book, Being Frank With Anne, attempts to put the contents of the famous diary into prose. Johnson strives, through her poetry, to bring a deeper emotional understanding of "Kitty" (as Anne fondly referred to the diary) to a her readers.

Each poem correlates with a dated entry in Anne's famous diary. Johnson's poems are dated in order that readers may cross-reference them with the diary. Johnson's poetry stands well on it's own. Readers can get a good understanding of what was going on in Anne's mind and world. It is when combined with the diary itself, read side by side, that the remarkability of what Johnson has done really sinks in.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a historical work, read and loved by millions. Heralded by some as a strong reminder of the horror of the era as it humanizes the hunted Jews. Johnson has successfully attempted to bring this well known work to a much more emotional and personal level: to bring heart the reality of Anne's world and the consequences and toll that that reality took on a vibrant young lady.

This is not a "happy" book, but is yet a wonderful one, written in order "to honor Anne and her legacy of remembrance." The emotion, the anxiety, the wonder - readers will experience Anne's world in a way previously unknown. Johnson is to be applauded for the depth to which she leads her readers.