The Diary of a Young Girl, book review. (Anne Frank)

Okay, this might get a bit controversial but here goes.

Have you ever read a book where the subject matter is so boring but for some reason, be it the overarching premise, a genre you like, a character you gel with - maybe it's a favourite author so you feel obliged to read it - or a myriad other reasons, you still continue? Well, this book is like that, just not for any of the above things I've mentioned.

Let me explain.

Reading three hundred plus pages of anyone's diary when you don't know them, have little to nothing in common with them, grew-up fifty years apart in different countries, would be boring in itself but add to that that the author of the diary was a young girl, that the diary spans over two years of confinement in just one house/apartment, and that she lived with only her parents, her sister and four others, and you might be forgiven for thinking she'd have nothing to say, and to some extent she didn't.

There are many days where Anne Frank documents the mundane: what she ate for lunch and dinner, how she argued with her mother, got frustrated with the selfishness of others, particularly over food, cooking and chores but over time she writes about her love for her father, her total indifferent to her mother and sister, her feelings for the boy they are living with, her periods and how proud she feels at becoming a young woman - she even questions her sexuality at one point - but in most part the book is repetitious in nature. Under the circumstances I wonder what anyone else would have had to say, day in day out, if nothing ever changed, and so the monotony is to be expected.

This diary however is more than that. If you read between the lines, pick up on the subtext it underlines the author's loneliness, her frustrations, her inability to vocalise her feelings - she is the youngest and therefore often chastised for being silly, selfish, ignorant and too young to be told or to know things - so she painstakingly wrote everything down and it is this that takes the diary out of the boring category and adds an element of intrigue.

She writes about her longings for the future, how they spent hours on edge each day making no sound: unable to use the loo, have windows open, even walk around whilst the workers were in the shop below. She writes about her fears when the allied planes fly over, when the anti-aircraft guns fire, when she hears both good and bad news over the radio and dares to dream of an end. How she had the energy, the will power to continue writing through those dark days and nights, is testament to what a strong willed and determined young women she was.

Knowing how this book ends before you've even picked it up, adds a deep sadness to all those hopes when you read them, for as a reader you already know that they have been dashed and that she, Anne Frank and her family - with the exception of her father - will all die before the war's end.

This book is full of emotion: fear, happiness, loneliness, love, and the emotions you as a reader bring to it, but most of all it is filled with hope but, due to the nature of the author's death and that of her family, it left me with a profound feeling of sadness when turning the final page and reading Anne Frank's last diary entry.

I shan't put a star rating on this book and never will, but I have added it to my Goodreads bookshelves as a 'Must Read', which should tell you all you need to know.

Happy Easter to all those who celebrate.

Don't forget to search my blog for your favourite authors and books and if I haven't read them, message me with your recommendations.

Schindler's Ark, book review. (Thomas Keneally)

It's when fiction is fact that you get books like this.

During World War II, in the city of Krakow, Poland, not more than a few hours from the Concentration Camp, Auschwitz Birkenau, Oscar Schindler set up a ceramics factory - which also made munitions for the war effort - and enslaved hundreds of Jews in the process, but by enslaving them (he was an undeniable capitalist) he offered them a rare means of hope in a period of history that is now viewed by most, as humanity's (and I don't use that word lightly) darkest.

Beginning with a brief history of both Schindler and Goth - the soon to become tyrant who liquidated the Krakow ghetto and was appointed the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the man who randomly executed people (Jewish of course) for no other reason than they weren't running fast enough or had somehow been disrespectful - the reader soon finds themselves enveloped in a world they can't, and hopefully never will have to, understand; a world where people aren't people anymore, where they are not only treated worse than animals, they are believed to be worse than animals.

A world where you have six hundred calories a day to survive on, where the roof over your head is shared with rats, the dead and the dying, where the thin scratchy garments you're given to wear wouldn't keep out the cold in Spring, let alone a Polish winter.

Having witnessed the Aktion taken by the SS (Schutzstaffel - meaning protection squadron) to clear the Krakow ghetto, Oscar and a few associates begin to make plans, realising that unless they offered their workers protection, they too would be shipped off to Auschwitz and never be seen again; and so, a list is created.

Schindler was arrested several times during the war (for bribery) but being the player that he was, and having grateful friends in high places, he remained free, which enabled him to continued his work to the end of hostilities.

Written in the early 1980s and after extensive research and interviews with many who lived through the holocaust, this book will leave you emotionally scarred, no question about that, but just like Laurence Rees's book, Nazis, A Warning From History, says, 'One must heed such warnings and never forget what happened the day humanity collapsed so spectacularly,' and we really must.

Last year (20/08/18) I blogged about Max Hastings's rather superb book about World War II, All Hell Let Loose, and summed that up with the staggering statistic that, fifty-six million people perished as a result of World War II, and what we mustn't forget but sometimes do, is that out of those fifty-six million, many millions were civilians, non-combatants – with six million of them being Jewish and killed for no other reason than their bloodline.

Read this book I beg you, for although it is horrific beyond imagination and will tear at your heart, it is a must-read if you ever want to understand just a snippet of what it must have been like to live in such conditions, and yes, if you've seen the film, both the girl in the red dress and the boy (albeit he was a teenager at the time) who hid in the cesspit, were both real, but only one of them survived.
To put a star rating on a book like this seems a bit crass but in the hope that it might get others to pick up a copy and read it, I will give it five.

All Hell Let Loose, book review. (Max Hastings) (Warning! Content some may find upsetting).

I don't know about you but I don't tend to read a lot of non-fiction, but there are exceptions, this being one of them.

Along with, James Holland and Antony Beevor, Max Hastings is one of only a few non-fiction authors I have read more than once, and for good reason. His narrative is a mixture of cold hard facts, the death, destruction and destitution that comes with war, spliced with first hand testimony of those that fought in the fields, the streets, on the landing grounds, and with growing confidence and strength in the air, (thank you Winston), so our island, Europe, and millions of others around the world, could be free from tyranny.

The author also gives voice to those who never took up arms, the housewives, the land girls, WRENS, and some of the millions of refugees, and although I'm not going to discuss the cruelty that fellow humans inflict on those with the wrong bloodline, ethnicity, creed or beliefs, in this blog post, (you can read the book for that), what I will say is that Max Hastings' writing and research is truly amazing, humanising a book that is so full of depravity, that at times I questioned whether I wanted to continue.

This book charts the whole of World War II, from the phoney war of 39’ – 40’, to Japan's capitulation in 1945, from the tiniest islands in the Pacific, to the blood drenched streets of Stalingrad, and it is horrific beyond imagination. To put some sort of perspective on that, I'm going to ask you to visualise something.

Think back to the last time you sat in a packed cinema, the last football game you attended, rock concert maybe, and picture the crowd. How many people were there? 500? 2000? Maybe it was a stadium with 50,000, or a music festival with 100,000. Whatever the amount, fix that crowd in your mind.

Now, picture this: Between the 3rd September 1939 (the day Britain and her allies declared war on Germany remember) to the 14th August 1945, that's 2172 days, (or 5 years, 11 months and 11 days), and with your crowd in mind, how many people do you think died for every one of those days, on average?

Not maimed, or injured, raped or beaten, not starved or displaced, but killed.

Twenty seven thousand! That's, twenty seven thousand people dying, every day, for two thousand seven hundred and seventy-two days, consecutively.

If you takes just one thing from this book, it's how powerful the human spirit is, that when there is no hope, when there is mass genocide, rape, torture, starvation and deprivation beyond anything we can ever imagine, men, women and children manage to cling on and survive.

LET US NOT FORGET THAT SHALL WE. LET US NOT DO THIS AGAIN.