The Man in the Box [Hardcover]

Thomas Moran (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1997

In 1943 Austria, young Niki Lukasser and his best friend Sigi, a blind girl, learn some of life's lessons when they take responsibility for the care and feeding of Dr. Weiss, a Jew whom Niki's parents are hiding from the Germans.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"During the war, we kept our Jew in a box." So begins The Man in the Box, Thomas Moran's debut novel. The Jew is Dr. Robert Weiss, an Austrian doctor on the run from the Nazis; the box is a small space built into the back of a hayloft owned by Herr Lukasser, an Austrian farmer. In the course of his two-year confinement, Dr. Weiss's only contact with the outside world is through Lukasser's son, Niki, whose life the doctor saved many years before, and Niki's blind girlfriend, Sigi. To these two teenagers he imparts the story of his life, fantastical tales conveyed in whispers through the wooden wall of his cell. Writing in spare, clean prose, Mr. Moran captures perfectly the tumultuous interior life of children on the verge of adulthood: the petty cruelties they visit on one another, their sexual stirrings and inchoate longings of adolescence. In the case of Niki, the added burden of the secret he must keep makes this passage particularly perilous--to himself, his family, and the Man in the Box.

From Publishers Weekly

With gentle and unflinching emotional honesty, this first novel by New York journalist Moran concerns a 13-year-old boy who must care for a Jew-"the man in the box"-his father hides from the Nazis. In the midst of neighbors and friends in his Austrian village who may or may not know his secret, young Niki Lukasser must learn to do the extraordinary while burdened with an ordinary, conflicted heart. When Dr. Robert Weiss unexpectedly appears on the Lukasser doorstep one day in 1943, the family is faced with a request that is difficult to refuse. Weiss saved the life of Niki, their only child, several years earlier and now is pleading that the favor be returned. After Niki's father briefly weighs "whether the debt he has incurred was heavy enough for the payment that now seemed to be required," he seals Weiss into a tiny hidden room he has built in the loft of his barn. During the ensuing two years, Weiss's physical and emotional survival become the responsibility of Niki and his first love, Sigi, a blind girl. Though a tale of Holocaust survival, this is also the story of many friendships: between a worldly doctor and the bewildered children who tend to him yet look to him for guidance; between a sensitive young man and a perceptive young woman yearning to discover themselves; and among the sometimes stoic, sometimes irrational villagers, who have known each other all their lives. Although he can be pretentiously philosophical at times, Moran is a sophisticated storyteller who subtly explores the way ordinary people, even children, are capable of both good and evil, betrayal and sacrifice. BOMC and QPB alternate selection.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 260 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 1ST edition (January 27, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573220604
• ISBN-13: 978-1573220606
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,041,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moran better not lose his grip..., June 15, 2000

By 

"dearmad" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Man in the Box (Hardcover)

Because he is on the verge (in my opinion) of greatness. If he challenges himself more as a writer and a wordsmith and deepens his thinking, he will be under serious consideration for the Nobel. He is a humanist. And his writing is great humanist writing, but his ability (again, my humble opinion) has not yet matured. *ALL* of his books so far are worth reading.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting gem with complex characters, March 8, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Man in the Box (Paperback)

The strength of The Man in the Box is the clarity of the depiction of complex characters - even bit characters. The narrator's grandfather, for example, is referred to only in one short passage explaining the half-orphanhood of the narrator's best friend. Yet in the short passage a real three dimensional portrait of a hard, drinking man unmissed except, perhaps, by his wife.

No one is wholely evil or wholely saint ... in fact the motivation for hiding the Jew in the box is less than morally pure. And the Jew, isolated in his box with adolescents as his primary audience, has a wide range of responses to his current situation and to his excessive time to review his past.

This is not yet a great book but it is very good and its strength indicate that Thomas Moran is a writer well worth watching for.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A highly exiliirating account of very human problems, November 24, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Man in the Box (Hardcover)

I would give my .... to be able to write this way. Everything is fresh as seen through the eyes of a adolesent growing up in a remote village in Austria during the war. His father hides a jew to pay back a old debt, but soon the responsibility to keep this man alive and sane falls to the boy and his blind friend. The life in this village is discribed until you began to care about the school teacher, wince when something embarrassing happens, dispise the town bully, and wish you could visit the place yourself. Nothing in this book was predictable, I didn't know what was going to happen until the end and I didn't want the end to come to soon. This is not a typical comming of age novel. It is written in a way that shows the good & bad in everyone. It does not try to solve the "race" problem. Nobody is perfect yet everyone is very human. I can't wait for his next novel.