Febraury was a short month...that's my reasoning for only having read two books. Also, they both took a while to get through.
This was a very interesting book that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. (Yup, I'm catching up on my Christmas presents for the last several years.) It is thought to be an original manuscript written by a black slave woman in the 1850s. It was found at an auction by Henry Louis Gates, and researched and edited by him. There is a lengthy introduction about the acquisition of and the research done on the manuscript, which is what made it take a while to read. The book itself is fairly short, probably less than 200 pages. Gates makes the case that this is the first novel ever written by a female slave, and possibly by a black woman at all. The novel is though to be fiction, but heavily influenced by actual events in the author's life as well as the literary style of the day, namely the gothic and sentimental novels of the 19th century. An interesting read, mostly for its novelty. Three stars.
I just finished this one. This book was very sad, and actually kind of depressing. It's a holocaust story, but not your typical holocaust story. Told from the point of view of a Polish Gentile survivor of Auschwitz and a young American writer, it addresses issues not only of the war and the holocaust, but also of the decade of the 1940s and the feeling and mood of the time. It talks about how Americans, even though we were part of the war, for the most part did not know what went on in Europe during those years. It suggests that the suffering of the Holocaust was endured and experienced by many peoples throughout Europe and the world, not just Jews, and draws parallels between anti-Semitism and the heated racial tensions in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. The book had a little more profanity and other explicit scenes than I would have liked, but it was a wonderful, sad, heart breaking story that still applies today. Four stars.
Posts
This was a very interesting book that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago. (Yup, I'm catching up on my Christmas presents for the last several years.) It is thought to be an original manuscript written by a black slave woman in the 1850s. It was found at an auction by Henry Louis Gates, and researched and edited by him. There is a lengthy introduction about the acquisition of and the research done on the manuscript, which is what made it take a while to read. The book itself is fairly short, probably less than 200 pages. Gates makes the case that this is the first novel ever written by a female slave, and possibly by a black woman at all. The novel is though to be fiction, but heavily influenced by actual events in the author's life as well as the literary style of the day, namely the gothic and sentimental novels of the 19th century. An interesting read, mostly for its novelty. Three stars.
I just finished this one. This book was very sad, and actually kind of depressing. It's a holocaust story, but not your typical holocaust story. Told from the point of view of a Polish Gentile survivor of Auschwitz and a young American writer, it addresses issues not only of the war and the holocaust, but also of the decade of the 1940s and the feeling and mood of the time. It talks about how Americans, even though we were part of the war, for the most part did not know what went on in Europe during those years. It suggests that the suffering of the Holocaust was endured and experienced by many peoples throughout Europe and the world, not just Jews, and draws parallels between anti-Semitism and the heated racial tensions in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century. The book had a little more profanity and other explicit scenes than I would have liked, but it was a wonderful, sad, heart breaking story that still applies today. Four stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment