The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) by Anne Enright  (111)
$11.20
|
Afterwards: A Novel by Rachel Seiffert  (1)
$16.47
|
Field Study: Stories by Rachel Seiffert (1)
|
Amazing Disgrace (Five Star Expressions) by Catherine DiMercurio Dominic  (4)
$26.95
|
The Firebugs: A Morality Without a Moral by Max Frisch  (3)
|
This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are. Join Amazon Prime today. Already a member? Sign in.
The Dark Room
and over 140,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more
|
||||||||||||||||
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Three harrowing stories of people caught in the violent snare of Nazi Germany make up this evenly and unemotionally narrated first novel by an English woman living in Germany. Each of the stories bears its main character's name. The first entry concerns a boy called Helmut growing up in 1930s Berlin who has a birth defect barring him from serving in the army. He learns the trade of photography and chronicles in fascination first the evacuation of his native city, then its gradual destruction. Persistently, even when faced with evidence of the war's dreadful human toll, Helmut continues to spout the Fhrer's rhetoric. The Nazi bravado compensates for his physical shortcomings; at war's end, he is a hollow man. The next tale concerns the flight of a family of five bewildered children, led by Lore, the oldest girl, as they make their way after the Allied victory from Bavaria to their grandmother's house in Hamburg. Dependent on the charity of a fellow refugee (Tomas, a survivor of Buchenwald), the children are always on the verge of starving. After Tomas leads them to safety, Lore's gradual awareness of the Holocaust ages her beyond her years. Finally, in the last section, set in the late 1990s, a young German teacher named Micha digs into the hidden history of his dead grandfather's wartime activity, travels to Belarus to discover the truth of Opa's SS-Waffen deeds and must grapple with the new, terrifying information he unearths. Together, these three affecting works constitute a portrait of changing Germany and a psychological study of the ramifications of Nazi aggression. Seiffert's deliberately dispassionate narrative works to capture the rigid and self-righteous convictions of Germany's general population. Placed alongside the historical record, the tale gives a more complete, comprehensible picture of incomprehensible evil. 6-city author tour.
From Library Journal
Understandably, most of the literature dealing with the Nazi era has focused on the victims of the horrors. But to comprehend its impact fully, both then and now, it is also necessary to examine the lives of those on the periphery. In this first novel, Seiffert does just that via three disparate lives. A photographer's assistant with a physical deformity that keeps him out of the army records the changing climate in Berlin before and during the war without fully understanding what he is seeing. A teenage girl, whose parents are both party members placed in captivity at war's end, finds herself leading her four younger siblings on a harrowing, illegal journey across a now divided Germany to reach her grandmother in Hamburg. Finally, a young man in the late 1990s finds himself driven to discover why his beloved grandfather had been imprisoned for nine years in the Soviet Union following the war. When he discovers the truth, another struggle begins. Each of these compelling, wholly believable stories lends additional perspective to our understanding of the period. For all serious literary collections.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Three harrowing stories of people caught in the violent snare of Nazi Germany make up this evenly and unemotionally narrated first novel by an English woman living in Germany. Each of the stories bears its main character's name. The first entry concerns a boy called Helmut growing up in 1930s Berlin who has a birth defect barring him from serving in the army. He learns the trade of photography and chronicles in fascination first the evacuation of his native city, then its gradual destruction. Persistently, even when faced with evidence of the war's dreadful human toll, Helmut continues to spout the Fhrer's rhetoric. The Nazi bravado compensates for his physical shortcomings; at war's end, he is a hollow man. The next tale concerns the flight of a family of five bewildered children, led by Lore, the oldest girl, as they make their way after the Allied victory from Bavaria to their grandmother's house in Hamburg. Dependent on the charity of a fellow refugee (Tomas, a survivor of Buchenwald), the children are always on the verge of starving. After Tomas leads them to safety, Lore's gradual awareness of the Holocaust ages her beyond her years. Finally, in the last section, set in the late 1990s, a young German teacher named Micha digs into the hidden history of his dead grandfather's wartime activity, travels to Belarus to discover the truth of Opa's SS-Waffen deeds and must grapple with the new, terrifying information he unearths. Together, these three affecting works constitute a portrait of changing Germany and a psychological study of the ramifications of Nazi aggression. Seiffert's deliberately dispassionate narrative works to capture the rigid and self-righteous convictions of Germany's general population. Placed alongside the historical record, the tale gives a more complete, comprehensible picture of incomprehensible evil. 6-city author tour.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Understandably, most of the literature dealing with the Nazi era has focused on the victims of the horrors. But to comprehend its impact fully, both then and now, it is also necessary to examine the lives of those on the periphery. In this first novel, Seiffert does just that via three disparate lives. A photographer's assistant with a physical deformity that keeps him out of the army records the changing climate in Berlin before and during the war without fully understanding what he is seeing. A teenage girl, whose parents are both party members placed in captivity at war's end, finds herself leading her four younger siblings on a harrowing, illegal journey across a now divided Germany to reach her grandmother in Hamburg. Finally, a young man in the late 1990s finds himself driven to discover why his beloved grandfather had been imprisoned for nine years in the Soviet Union following the war. When he discovers the truth, another struggle begins. Each of these compelling, wholly believable stories lends additional perspective to our understanding of the period. For all serious literary collections.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
