The Righteous : The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover: 529 pages
• Publisher: Key Porter Books
• ISBN-10: 1552635120
• ISBN-13: 978-1552635124
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,440,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sir Martin Gilbert is one of the leading historians of his generation. An Honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford - of which he was a fellow for thirty years - he is the official biographer of Churchill and the author of eighty books, among them Churchill - A Life and The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. For more information please visit http://www.martingilbert

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Gilbert's best, March 10, 2003

By 

Michael Casey "Michael" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

Martin Gilbert has written more on the Holocaust than, perhaps, anyone else. This, his latest work, is deserving of special praise. Gilbert looks at the many non-Jews who played personal roles in saving small and large numbers of Jews during WWII. He spends time discussing the better known saviors such as Schindler and Wallenberg, but he also looks to the lesser known people who risked their lives to save one or two at a time. He examines the many married couples who took in Jewish children and protected them as their own, and he looks at the many religious officials who hid children in convents and churches. Gilbert's examination of these relative unknowns is very good reading, and his detailed and painstaking research into so many people is obvious. This book is wonderful for so many reasons. It is an excellent history -- a history of a subject all too forgotten -- and it is a refreshing portrait of an otherwise horrible time in the history of mankind. These individual saviors stand out against a black background, and Gilbert's writing serves them justice and gives them the recognition they deserve.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So much to write, so little space, February 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (Hardcover)

After attending a seminar on teaching the Holocaust, I needed a little inspiration, so I purchased this book, which recounts the stories of hundreds of Jews who were rescued by non-Jews during the course of the Holocaust. Each chapter addresses a different part of Europe and the rescues that took place within that region, mostly through first-person accounts. The stories are very compelling and show quite clearly how much people were willing to risk in order to do the right thing when so few were willing to do so. The downside to the book is that each story is probably worth a chapter on its own and not just a paragraph or two; however, since this is one of the few books I've seen that puts all of the stories together in one place, so it's a worthwhile trade. On the whole, a very good book--though it is depressing to think how few were ultimately willing to help out their neighbors and do what what right and decent.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting topic, but a disjointed book lacking analysis, February 7, 2005

By 

Yaakov Ben Shalom - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (Paperback)

This book has gotten a lot of praise for its treatment of a subject that has been overlooked for too long. That being said, this book -- as a work of history -- has some serious flaws. It is a collection of anecdotes, lacking analysis.

Each chapter contains scores of tales and anecdotes of rescue. The author does little to link them up. He provides scant analysis contrasting his different anecdotes or establishing patterns of rescue (e.g. those who did it for money vs. those who acted out of religious belief or ideology, cities vs. villages, etc.). The chapters are arranged by country or geographical region of Europe, but there is hardly any discussion explaining why some countries had higher rates of rescue than others. It doesn't seem as if Gilbert has a working thesis that he wishes to defend through his evidence. Rather, it seems that he went to the Yad Vashem archive and collected as many interesting tales of rescue as he could find and then categorized them by country for his book.

Because it is filled with many, many interesting stories, this book will chiefly be of interest to "lay readers" or armchair historians with an interest in Holocaust studies. Professional historians and scholars of the Holocaust may use this book as a resource (esp. for teaching), but they will quickly stumble upon this book's limits.