Night [Leather Bound]

Elie Wiesel (Author)

Product Details

• Leather Bound
• Publisher: Easton (1988)
• ASIN: B000IZB5CE
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (777 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,715,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elie Wiesel is the author of more than forty books, including his unforgettable international best sellers Night and A Beggar in Jerusalem, winner of the Prix Médicis. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States Congressional Gold Medal, and the French Legion of Honor with the rank of Grand Cross. In 1986, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and University Professor at Boston University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

587 of 621 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful is an understatement, January 18, 2006

By 

FrKurt Messick "FrKurt Messick" (Bloomington, IN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Night (Hardcover)

I recall when I first read 'Night', it was just after Elie Wiesel had given a lecture at my university. It was in the mid-1980s, and the lecture hall was standing-room-only. Wiesel's presentation moved us to tears, and moved us to anger, and moved me to want to follow up on his words by reading what he had written.

This is written a style that seems to be typical of many modern Israeli novelists; it is so close to the truth of the actual events that transpired in Wiesel's life that it might as well be treated as autobiographical. Thus, it seems to some to be more a work like a novel than a memoir, but Weisel describes it himself as more of a deposition. It isn't autobiography in the traditional sense, but that is what helps give the book its power. Weisel remembers the events here, This is actually part of a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and The Accident - although each element stands alone with integrity. (Dawn and The Accident are works of fiction, but also draw on Weisel's own recollections and feelings.)

How does one deal with survival after such atrocities as that at Birkenau and Auschwitz? How can one have faith in the world? How can one accept that a people so closely identified with a powerful God can ever accept that God again? Where is God in the midst of such things?

Wiesel himself as spent his life in search of such answers, but doesn't provide them here. Why then would one want to read such accounts as these? Wiesel was silent for many years, until he was brought into speech and writing as a witness to the events. Wiesel proclaims that there is in the world now a new commandment - 'Thou shalt not stand idly by' - when such things are happening, one must act. One must remember the past in all its personal aspects to both honour those who suffered and to forestall such things happening again (which, given the the depressing repetitive nature of history, is a difficult task).

This is the longest short book I've ever read. It is one that has stayed with me from the first page, and I've never been able to shake the images brought forward, the misery and suffering, the existence of evil and brutality, the sadness and desolation. We live in a culture that likes to gloss over pain and suffering, mask it with drugs and other things, and always end the story with a happy ending.

There is no happy ending here - even Wiesel's own survival is a questionable good here. How does one live after this? How does the world go on?

One thing is certain, we must never forget, and this book is part of that active remembering that we are called to do.

61 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutality of Apathy Revealed in Relentless Detail and Still Sadly Resonant Far Beyond the Holocaust, January 17, 2006

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Night (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

In a world that often feels like it is teetering toward relenting madness, Elie Wiesel's vividly haunting 1960 memoir still reminds us that there was a precedent for the deranged mindset that justifies acts of terrorism. In a concise, unadorned manner, he relives the spiraling insanity that surrounded the Jewish population of Sighet, Transylvania, as insulated a world as one could imagine and certainly a community who understandably could not embrace the insanity of the extermination occurring around them. Inevitably, they are taken to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous concentration camps, where Wiesel provides painfully palpable detail of the day-to-day living conditions. He not only records the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi guards toward the Jews, as other have, but more tellingly, describes the inhumanity of the camp inmates toward each other for the sake of survival.

It's a stark peek into the nature of evil that is at once uncomfortable to acknowledge and invaluable to read and absorb. The propagation of evil from forces unexpected is what makes Wiesel's book resonate today. As we consider the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Dili and Liquica Church massacres in East Timor, the 1994 Rwandan genocide (dramatized in the superb film, 2004's "Hotel Rwanda"), or most pertinently, the detention camps that exist today in North Korea, it is obvious that the Third Reich did not have a monopoly on justifying such slaughter. With his two older sisters, Wiesel was able to survive the camps and share his devastating story with future generations. Compressed from a much larger memoir Wiesel wrote in Yiddish, the book represents a powerfully affecting treatment that edits the key moments of his existence to their essence. The result is elliptical and startling. Like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" series, William Styron's "Sophie's Choice", Thomas Keneally's "Schindler's List" and of course, the most heartbreaking, Anne Frank's diary, Wiesel's work lends yet another piercing look into the unanticipated breaches of the human soul during one of history's most dire times. Strongly recommended.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Want More Info!, September 29, 2009

By 

Live Laugh Love - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)

I recently finished reading Night for a school project. This was my second time reading it and I noticed so much more detail this time. While it was a good read, I was wanting more. I wish Elie would have included more about his life. Also, I would have loved to know more about his sisters and other family members. I did some research and found out that Elie was actually reunited with his sisters! You would have never known when reading Night, I thought they had perished in the Holocaust. I also would have liked to know about Elie's life after the Holocaust. What were the long term effects? What does he have to say to the world about his experience? What advice does he have to offer to the world?