Europe Books

This is one of three books written by Aline Griffith Romanos about her adventures as a undercover spy during WW II in Spain. It is excellent! I first read the book 25 years ago, have read them all more than once, recommended all three books to many, and have heard only high praise for the series. They are fun, well written, and real page turners!

I have purchased 4 books by Aline Romanos. I absolutely love them. The fact that there is truth behind the story and that she really was an upper-class lady as well as a spy excites me. I find myself wishing I lived an adventurous life. She has a talent when it comes to recreating her life and exploits. I could not put it down!

I can only echo the words of the previous reviewers! Countess Aline's books (...Wore Red, ...Went Dancing - so far!) are compelling, and I was truly absorbed from beginning to end! When I finished the first, I couldn't wait to start the second - and now I'm impatient to get the third - "...Wore Silk" - from my sister! I had to keep reminding myself that she would NOT be killed, as she was alive to write these books! And her ability to manage the pertepual romantic current with no "smut" is impressive! Her description of "masculine hands," the brush of lips on her ear, or the mention of leg-to-leg contact during the tango says it all! But beyond that, she teaches so much about Spanish customs and culture, from the attraction of bull fighting to how on earth they manage the high combs and mantillas, to daily routine, meal times, siesta - she never stops. How can this remarkable strong female hero be of the same generation as my mother?

Fascinating. My daughter is reading "The Spy Who Wore Red" and finds it fascinating as well.

My mom first gave me this book to read back when I was in high school. I recently picked it up again at the library to take with me on vacation - and was once again drawn into this amazing - and real life - mystery. In fact, I enjoyed the book so much I almost didn't want to leave my hotel room until I finished it (which didn't make my brothers too happy)! Aline weaves mystery and international intrigue with a jet-setting lifestyle as she hob-nobs with the likes of Liz Taylor and Audrey Hepburn while trying to solve a mystery that's haunted her for 20 years! I'm just starting her next book, "The Spy Wore Silk" and reccommend that anyone who loves a good mystery (and don't we all?) should check out Aline's books. They're absolutely addictive, and, in this case, that's a good thing.

Reading this book gives one insight not only on Stalin but also on the political system that he constructed around his personality. Its effects are still being felt in today's Russia--much of Stalin's struggle with his identity and place in the world was and still is mirrored by the Russian state itself. Tucker is a masterful storyteller; one comes away with a great sense of both the historical moment and the political weight of the subject matter. This book should still be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the Russian political system.

Tucker's careful storytelling hews to historical facts and grippingly narrates Stalin's creeping domination of the Soviet idea. This book is complete. A must read for all interested in recent Russian history.

This is an excellent biography of Stalin, the middle book in a proposed trilogy. Tucker weaves events in the Soviet Union around the twisted, paranoid personality of Joseph Stalin, former seminary student. What I found to be the most intriguing was how every time Stalin changed his mind about something, everyone had to fall in line or risk being labeled a "wrecker" or "counter-revolutionary." Stalin was not particularly brilliant, and he was not Lenin's choice as a successor, but he had a genius for bureacratic maneuvering that put him in the powerful position that he held for years. For all his paranoia and all the damage he did to Russia, it is amazing that someone didn't actually knock him off. It is a chilling reflection on how obsequious even the best of us can be when motivated by fear.

Over the years, I have read a number of books on Stalin, some good and some awful and I am convinced that this book, along with Professor Tucker's other work, "Stalin as a Revolutionary" is the best work on this subject (Adam Ulam's work would be the best one volume study of Stalin).

What sets this book apart from the others is Tucker's first rate understanding of Stalin and the world in which he operated. Only someone as stubborn as Stalin could have imagined he was creating paradise on earth while at the same establishing one of the most hellish regime's in world history and Tucker captures him in all of his evil. Even though he is a widely respected actademic, Tucker writes in such a way as to make this 20th century monster understandable to expert and beginner alike.

The only complaint that I have is that Tucker has yet to follow through with the next part of Stalin's career. It seems to be truism of late that no one can complete a multi-volume work on one of the leaders of World War II. Kenneth Davis was unsuccessful in his magnificent FDR biography as was William Manchester in his attempt to capture Churchill in his series of books on the great prime minister. I am only hoping that wealth of material that has become available with the fall of communism and the Soviet Union does not hamper Professor Tucker's efforts.

Neither Stalin, the collectivization crisis, nor the terror suffer from a dearth of good and serious studies. Yet despite the crowded field, Tucker's "Stalin in Power" is by far the best treatment of all three complex events. No other book sets out as credible, well-researched and well considered a theory of the workings of Stalin's mind. The great challenge presented by the Soviet thirties is the comprehension of the real logic behind what appears from the outside as mass irrationality. Most writers' personal models of depth and social psychology are inadequate to the task. Tucker succeeds, by a significant margin.

This my favorite book ever. I first read this when I was 11, and I might've read this about 30-40 times. This book has helped me to go through tough times and always has been an inspiration. After my book got lost, I painstakingly found the same edition I always loved. This is a must read. As an admirer of Soviet literature, I believe this is one of the best books of post WWII era.

It's the best book that I have read in a last years! I was very impressted by the main hero - Aleksei Meres'ev. This book is very easy to read so I highly recommended it for everyone. It's one of the most brilliant Russian novel of the twentith century

It is widely said that our utmost abilities, mental and physical, surface in extreme conditions. By definition, war is an extreme condition predicament. Let alone war in the frozen lands of the Russian (then Soviet) plains. One man and his will against all odds... The achievement and prevail of human spirit against life's little games.... Makes a man wonder when not to smile, when to complain, what to think as impossible. I guess impossible is just something we just don't want bad enough as Kazantzakis put it... Recommendable to all... Enjoy every page; I know I did...

One of the greatest novels that have ever been written. It makes one realize the great power of human spirit. Brilliantly written. Unfortunately unknown to the book lovers at large.

This book shows not only the amazing story of man with courage and passion. But, about the greatness of Russian Literature. I will recomend this book highly to all wise readers and friends. Boris Polevio is one of the greatest Russian authors.

while this is clearly based on true experience, it is hard to believe that such a professional account was written by jan karski himself. marvelous as it is, it is also a piece of propaganda for the polish government in exile. is there any information out there about a possible ghost writer or 'collaborator'?

In Story of a Secret State, Jan Karski recounts his work with the Polish Underground during WWII. The book was fascinating overall, though I found a few short sections to be overly detailed and a bit dry. Impressively, Jan speaks of his own heroic actions without sounding boastful. I especially enjoyed the his depiction of all the brave people who helped him carry out his work. Karski's account of his visits to the Warsaw ghetto and the death camp surely benefitted from his precise description, making the events horrifically real. I highly recommend this book to all.

Jan Karski's trip to England and the US, which warned the Allies of the Holocaust in progress, is well known. However, Karski is often incorrectly thought of as some sort of unusual moral giant who tried to save the Jews all on his own. In fact, as this book makes clear, his heroic trip was planned, ordered, and performed in the context of his active, multifaceted involvement in the Polish Underground. For example, Karski's visit to the Belzec death camp was facilitated by a rendezvous on the nearby property of a Polish farmer who was also a member of the Underground (p. 340).

Karski was involved in the defense of Poland from the first hours of WWII. A few authors (e. g. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas) have tried to deny the existence of a German fifth column during the German-Soviet conquest of Poland (September-October 1939). In actuality, Karski's very unit came under fire from members of this fifth column (p. 8). The attackers were Polish citizens of German descent.

Karski ended up in Soviet and then German captivity. He repeatedly writes of the unbelievable barbarity of both conquerors. While in a Gestapo prison, Karski slashed his wrists in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He had feared that he might break down under the incessant torture and betray his confidants in the Polish Underground. Karski was freed by a daring commando attack by the Underground combined with a well-placed bribe of a German guard.

Karski elaborates on the forced Germanization of Poznan (pp. 78-82), something attempted unsuccessfully before under Frederick the Great and then Bismarck. The Poles were brutally expelled. Very few of the remaining Poles chose to register as Germans and thus become Volksdeutsche.

Karski (p. 132) succinctly summarizes the attitude of almost all full-blooded Poles to the Nazis: "The German occupation was never recognized by the Polish people, and there could be no doubt on this score because, in Poland alone of all the occupied countries, there never appeared anything resembling a legal or pseudo-legal body composed of Poles and collaborating with the Germans. Indeed, in all of Poland, not a single political office in the German-controlled administration was ever held by a Pole; not a single head of any province was Polish".

Jan Thomas Gross has insinuated that Poles had no Quisling because the Germans did not want any Polish Quisling. Jan Karski's personal experience with the Germans adds to the refutation to Gross' silly claim. While a captive of the dreaded Gestapo, Karski was personally approached by a high-ranking SS man (pp. 155-163) who tried to induce him to become a Polish Quisling. The SS-man promised him relief from torture, and then appealed to the hopelessness of the Polish cause and the certainty of German victory in the wake of the fall of France and the seemingly-incipient peace treaty with England. The SS-man also cited the sensibleness of all the other nations that had formed collaborationist governments under German rule and said that Poles should also, for once, come to their senses and do the same. Karski refused.

Karski visited Nazi Germany itself. He reports (p. 217) never encountering any sign of German opposition to the Nazi rule. (Of course, some developed later as Germany began to lose one battle after another, and the attempt was made to assassinate Hitler in order to save Germany's skin from increasingly certain defeat).

A certain amount of detail is given to Karski's visits with British and American leaders. It is a shame that Roosevelt made such supportive statements about Poland while, behind Karski's back, he was already selling out the Poles to the Soviet Union.

This book was assigned for a graduate course I took in Eastern European history; I couldn't believe that any required reading could be so exciting. It is the true story of Jan Karski's experience as a messenger for the Polish underground, and it doesn't include a dull page. Karski completed several missions, was captured by the Germans, and escaped. The leaders of Poland's Jewish community, knowing that Karski was going to the West, arranged for him to disguise himself as a guard in a death camp so that he could witness the atrocities. He not only went and included his horrifying experiences in this book, he personally reported what he saw to president Roosevelt and other prominent Americans. Karski knew that the West was betraying Poland and, as a last ditch effort to influence Western policy, he wrote and published this book in 1944. It was a best seller and, I believe, a Book-of-the-month club selection. So much for not knowing about what Hitler was doing to the Jews! Do read this amazing story and, to get the full background, read the book "Karksi, How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust," by E. Thomas Wood.

This book belongs on everybody's short list of Polish and East European history. Jan Karski was a truly heroic man and is story is told in plain, straightforward langauge as the story of one man who took enormous risks to tell the story of the Holocaust. A necessary corrective to much of the polemic on the complex issue of Poles and the Nazi occupation. Not to be missed. This is the second anniversary of his death here in Washington.

It's my first time to really get into the picture of the holocaust as almost living the story by reading it, The story is more then amazing and get the reader into the actual world as lived by the author at that time.
As much amazing the Nazie's viciousness you will be amazed by the young boy (the author) bravery against all chances.
More then getting an historical event as seen by a movie about the holocaust, ANY ONE WILL LEARN from that story about the life we are living and more ..

It has been a long time since I have read a book that had me so "hooked". It has all the elements of an engrossing story... and to boot, it's all true. What an inspiration, delivered in clear, concise writing. It's surprising that it has never been made into a movie. Very highly recommended for all ages. Thank you for sharing it all, Mr. Eisner.

The facts as they should be told as part of a beautiful love story. Eisner had a deep love of his people, his family, his Helina and most importantly of his life. This is a compelling story and a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust.

This incredible piece of writing is a materpiece! I was engrossed in The Survivor from the first page and was deeply moved throughout. Jack Eisner's incredible true story of survival against all odds in the face of unimaginable human cruelty and brutality by the Nazis, should be compulsory reading for teenage secondary students!!

Hello there, I'm not a big reader, but when I found your book at the library, it was too good and for the first time, I read it twice! I don't know how anybody could have make it through these circumstances. I recommanded it to my sister and she read it also. I always recommand it to all the poeple I know. This person is extraordinary! I'm still looking for a place where I could buy it.

Erico Verissimo is an importante Brazilian's author.Verissimo written Time and Wind in 9 years,1940-1949- and describe the history of Rio Grande do sul the most meridional region of Brazil.

Time and the Wind is a beautiful novel wrote by one of the greatest and most famous writers from Brazil (Érico Veríssimo). It tells the rich history of Rio Grande do Sul in a very interesting way and it is surely one of the best books I've ever read.

Time and Wind is a magnificent masterpiece written by Erico Verissimo, a modernist author who does a fine job in telling the history of his (and mine) state since Los Siete Pueblos de las Missiones until the 1960 through 2000 pages that leave you wanting more. Anti-heroes, heroins, villains; they all populate a realistic look inside the RS as shown by the family Terra Cambará (Terra=Earth and Cambará is a solid wood) telling several stories of love, betrayal, friendship, folklore, politics and time. And wind.

Never a book explained so well how a Nation feels, think and love as Erico Verissimo's Time and the Wind saga. Since the discovering of Brazil till the modern age all the passions of a people are told in a way you couldn't forget and will make you beg for more when it's over. A classic!

This novel of Erico Verissimo's, consists in 3 parts and more than 2,200 pages of pure history, adventure, emotion and love. It's the story of the Terra-Cambará family along 200 years, showing since the colonization of the South of Brazil until the government of Getúlio Vargas, in 1945. This book has all for those who likes to read, and a curiosity: Gabriel Garcia Marques was influenced by The Time and the Wind to write the great A Hundred Years of Solitude.

I recently had the pleasure of reading this wonderful book and I found it to be one of the most exciting books I have ever read. The author deftly describes the events leading up to his discovery of a previous life. From the opening line, "They've come to KILL me!", Mr. Norsic takes you on his very personal journey of self-awareness -- I couldn't put it down -- a thrilling read! I highly recommend it to everyone!

Mr. Norsic's book once started, is difficult to put down. I found myself eagerly anticipating what further revelations awaited me as I turned each page. It is rare to find an authentic, believable reincarnation book and I am grateful to Mr. Norsic for having written "To Save Russia, The Reincarnation of Nicholas II" for the undeniable proof within its pages that Mr. Norsic is the reincarnation of Nicholas II.

I applaud Mr. Norsic's courage in the telling of his past life experience as he has helped to further enlighten and educate us all about reincarnation in an interesting and compelling way.

I recently read this very interesting book by Donald Norsic.The book was so well written I could not stop reading it. My eyes were glued to every printed word! The book so impressed me that I read it twice. I wanted to ensure that I missed nothing important and that I understood it correctly as written. No book in recent memory has made such an impression on me. I am currently reading it for the third time! I believe "namedejour" from Texas is being extremely critical. Mr. Norsic writes extremely well and his experence is worth the read!

Donald Norsic's story of his unfolding connection with Russia is riveting. We don't consciously volunteer to have our lives torn asunder in this manner. Rather we are drawn to the event horizon of the inescapable. We are each woven into the fabric of eternity by threads which stretch beyond time and space. Like Ariadne, Donald Norsic has grasped the threads of his destiny and is following them back to their source. His exploration of this mystery will shed light and understanding on our most profound realisites.

While I never disbelieved the concept of reincarnation, I had no particular reason to believe in it either, until Don Norsic's experience came to my attention. I like that the author's intent does not seem to be to convince readers that he is Nicholas, but simply to share with us the amazing string of experiences and "coincidences" that caused himself to reach a reluctant understanding of who he is and was.

I found his chapter 9 to be especially interesting with new information about the circumstances of the Tsar's murder.

Largely as a result of this book, frankly, I--forever the skeptic--now view reincarnation as a very likely possibility. The evidence seems to be building.

One could almost draw paralleles, with fate of Danilo Kis and his novel, in former Yugoslavia, with every "free thinker" troughout the known history. Nobody, especially totalitarian regime, likes "the voice that yells in the desert". So it became that this book was putted on a certain kind of "index librorum prohibitorum". What makes it tragic, is the fact that that was happening in the upper half of twentieth century.

What was so incriminating in that book, that communist party simply had to make that move? When one starts to question revollution, when one starts to question necessity of one voice-one peolpe doctrine, when one sees in "fight of the oppressed" just a certain kind of tragedy, human misery that has been manifesting repeatedly through human existene, one must become "enemy of the state". And that has not changed up until today, nor it will. But that is the story for some other place and time.

There is much of J.L. Borges influence in this work, especially in the short stoy called "Dogs and books", but you mustn't think that this is Borgesian "collection" of stories. These work are much less artistic (whatever that means) and much more they resemble reality, life itself, than Borges work does.

By telling the story of seven individuals, the lived their life in a countries rich with political struggles, Danilo Kis draws excellent portrait oh human ability to endure, and even so, to somehow fail miserably and be forever gone from this world.

Why the four stars? I was hearing so much of this book, and when I finally read it, it somehow dissapointed me, probably was expecting to much, or maybe is just that, taht I have failed to grasp entire meaning of the novel. So, better to read it again :) If you looked for great writer from, Mid-Southern Europe, Kis is the one you could deffinitely start with.

This book of Kis' is a masterful work. The author said they are short stories but the publisher pushed it as a novel and in a way it is something between the two. The stories are seperate and there is not one main plot but a common theme runs through the work and occasionally characters from one story will reoccur or turn up in another story. They are connected though it seems in the sort of way as when someone might say it is a small world that we live in.
In his native land this book caused an uproar as the stories pass themselves off as fact but in Kis' style fact and fiction, history and imagination blend for a common aesthetic goal. This he picked up from Borges and his use of "document" in fiction.
All this helps the book stand out as a superior work of literature without even getting to the political theme of revolution and the role of individuals in mass movements.
This edition is perfect with the intro by Brodsky and William T. Vollmann's afterword.
A must read for anyone.

he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.

Danilo Kis was born in Serbia in 1935 to a Hungarian Jewish father and Montenegrin Serbian mother. His father perished in the Holocaust. Kis died of cancer in 1990 at age 55. As noted in an excellent introduction by the writer, poet and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, publication of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich in Yugoslavia in 1976 created a firestorm in Belgrade similar to the controversies that flared up when Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the USSR during Khrushchev's thaw. The book was savaged by the Yugoslav writer's union. As Brodsky notes in one memorable line, "there are several topics an author may deal with which can jeopardize his well-being, and history is one of them". The controversy, standing alone, may justify reading Tomb for Boris Davidovich. I am pleased to report that these stories are so well-constructed and laden with meaning that it would be worth reading even if its publication had been greeted with equanimity by the apparatchiks that manned the Yugoslav writers' union.

The seven stories that comprise Danilo Kis' A Tomb for Boris Davidovich have a few elements in common. Each involves a protagonist from a different country, Ireland, Hungary, Rumania, Poland, or Russia. In effect, each protagonist comes from a nation or a group that participated in the Comintern (the Soviet led Third International that coordinated the worldwide activities of various Communist organizations established by Lenin in 1919). Each gets swept up in the machinations that swirled around the Soviet Union's Great Terror of the 1930s. Each ends up either dead or in the Gulag.

With one exception each of the stories takes places in the 1930s. The one exception, "Dogs and Books" is set in 14th-century France at the time of the inquisition. Although that story seems out of place, when one compares the structure and fact-pattern of this story to the title story of the book one can only be struck by the obvious similarities between the methods and mind-set of the inquisitors and the methods and mind-sets of the interrogator in the story Tomb for Boris Davidovich.

The title story is also jarring because it contains many of the same themes set out in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. In the context of a short story, the brevity and terseness of Kis' language makes the telling of the story considerably more powerful in some respects than Koestler's novel length telling of a similar tale. Even if a reader feels that Kis' story does not quite match Koestler's, the fact that the comparison can be made with a straight face is high praise.

Last, Tomb for Boris Davidovich should be of great interest to anyone interested in the work of the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. The structure and theme of Tomb for Boris Davidovich was intended by Kis to be part of a literary polemic between Kis and Borges, specifically concerning the title of Borge's Universal History of Infamy. Kis discusses this literary exchange in one of his essays. In it he asserted that the universal infamies related by Borges were those of gangsters, pirates and highwaymen. Kis argues that as far as infamy was concerned, "infamy is when in the name of the idea of a better world for which whole generations have perished, in the name of a humanistic idea, you build camps and destroy both people and their most intimate drams of a better world."

In many respects, Tomb for Boris Davidovich may be considered as an exquisitely crafted attempt to construct a literary monument to those who died (perhaps naively and foolishly) and for whom bells never rang and for whom the widows have long since stopped weeping.

L.Fleisig

I have enjoyed this (and all other Danilo Kis's books) immensly.

Beautifully written, surprisingly nonchalant portrayal of the actual driving force behind the Russian Communist Revolution, namely an international gang of charismatic professional criminals. Makes you think twice before you empathise with all the victims of Stalin's camps indiscriminantly - some of them obviously deserved their terrible fate.

I bought this book to add to my collection of Greene Knowe Books that I read to my children when they were small. The stories kept the kids on the edge of their seats wondering what would happen next.

I almost had a fit when I saw this title, but with a little research learned that I already had it. The whole series is first rate.

Tolly has returned to Green Knowe and his Grandmother full of excitement at being there once more, but an unhappy surprise lies in wait for him: the portrait of the children Toby, Alexander and Linnet is missing from the wall. It would seem a small loss but for the fact that its absence means that the children's spirits are also not present in the house.

Grandmother Oldknow explains the painting's loss due to poor finances, though soon sparks hope in Tolly for its return due to the tale of the missing treasure of Green Knowe (which he vows to find), and stories of another family ancestor: Susan Oldknow. Born to a vain mother, a kind but absent father, a spoilt older brother Sefton, and an overly pious grandmother, Susan knows her blindness is a terrible blow to the family's pride: "I can't take her into society, she'll never be married, and I'll have her *always*!" her mother laments when the sad truth is revealed.

Smothered by a good-hearted but utterly disillusioned Nanny, Susan is not allowed to do a thing on her own, till her Captain father brings back a gift from his travels that shocks the entire family: a West Indian boy named Jacob to keep her company. Their extraordinary friendship can only be describe through L. M. Boston's beautiful prose, as when the two meet:

"'Who is it Papa?' Susan asked. Jacob answered for himself, in a voice whose smallest half-utterance she was never afterwards to mistake for any other. 'It's me, Missy.'"

As with Tolly's previous summer in the house, the line between past and present blurs, and he once again interacts with the older inhabitants of the house, though this time in a far more influential manner, going so far as to actively participate in the stories his Grandmother tells him each night. While other time-travelling stories leave me completely cross-eyed, the "Green Knowe" stories treat it as something utterly natural, and thus so do the readers.

As a sequel to "Children of Green Knowe", this second part (also published as "Chimneys of Green Knowe") is undoubtably superior to its predecessor. Though I missed Toby, Alexander and Linnet, their part in the first story was as whimsical spirits - Susan and Jacob have a definite story assigned to them, and interact with Tolly in a more important way, stirring events into being on both sides of the centuries.

Lucy Boston creates a sophisticated commentary on prejudice that still rings true today in her use of blind Susan and West Indian Jacob. As she comments, blind people were either poor and beggars, or rich and had servants to live for them, and Susan was certainly of the latter group. As such, the poor girl often finds herself strapped to a chair with her doll tied to its arm, disliked by her grandmother who thinks her condition a judgement for her mother's vain lifestyle, and punished for fingering things. Boston's descriptions of blindness in both Susan's life: "things stuck out of space like icebergs out of the sea", and Tolly's experiments (he discovers feet are more useful than hands in such an instance) are evocatively written, and so imaginatively told that it won't simply be children so have their minds expanded.

Second is Jacob, whose place in the story is still whilst England allowed slavery. This book was first published in 1958, and I was both impressed by Boston's distaste for slavery, and refreshed by the lack of extreme political correctness that so often clogs books on the subject written today. Boston presents the Slave Trade as a simple factuality, that could be neither explained nor excused, but simply a reality.

Truly, the "Green Knowe" stories are among the lost masterpieces of children's literature. Do everyone in your family a favour and read them - the house, the characters, the situations, and the sublime use of language that Lucy Boston uses is unforgettable.

I will never forget reading this book - and the others in this series - when I was in grade school. This was actually the first volume I read, although it's not chronologically the first in the group. It was one of those wonderful discoveries you sometimes make wandering aimlessly through the stacks in the local library - cracking a random volume, reading the first little bit, and realizing at once that you are beginning a literary love affair.

Then, as now, I was captivated by the magical "otherness" of L.M. Boston's Green Knowe and by the wonderful characterizations and tales within the tale. I couldn't put it down until I'd learned the fates of all the characters, and I wished that my suburban row house had even half the romance of the old manor house, and that my own prosaic grandma was a bit more mysterious.

Now that I'm much older (although not nearly as old as Grandmother Oldknow), I realize that the book is quite well-written - accessible for children but sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by anyone with a taste for the supernatural. And I've purchased a copy for my 11-year-old niece, who thankfully shares her auntie's interest in reading and love for stories with an otherworldly component. A must-read for book-lovers young and old.

It's the spring immediately following the events of "The Children of Green Knowe," and young Tolly Oldknow returns to the ancient manor of his family to stay with his great-grandmother over the Easter break. He barely steps through the door when he senses that something is wrong--and how horribly wrong it is: his ghost-friends, Toby, Alexander, and Linnet, have accompanied their portrait on loan-out to an exhibition, and may never return, for Mrs. Oldknow is desperate for money to make repairs to the house and has been offered a high price for the picture. Tolly resolves to search for the long-lost jewels of Maria Oldknow, the stylish wife of his 18th-century ancestor, which disappeared when the grand "new annex" of the manor burned down in a suspicious fire in 1798. Yet he soon finds that ghosts still lurk in Green Knowe--or perhaps not ghosts at all, since his blind ancestress Susan and her young black companion Jacob lived far beyond the ages at which they manifest to him. As is often the case at this house, time becomes a half-meaningless concept, past and present blend and communicate, and Mrs. Oldknow's stories of Susan and Jacob, Susan's vain and flighty mother and spoiled older brother Sefton, her young tutor Jonathan Morley (who, years later, she married), and the sinister manservant Caxton seem to draw these Georgians even closer to Now. Tolly himself finds that his modern-day actions resonate into the past and that--in one memorable sequence--he can even travel back to it and help Susan and Jacob conceal a young poacher from Caxton in a secret tunnel he has discovered. And in the end, even before those stories lead him to the hiding place of the jewels, the portrait is returned, and in a beautiful closing scene we get a hint of the possibility that Susan and Jacob may come to know Toby and his sibs as Tolly does. A worthy sequel to the first book and nearly as good.

Lawrence Powell set out to write a book about the David Duke phenomenon, about how a KKK leader and Nazi could sit in the Louisiana legislature and run for the U.S. Senate as a Republican. But work on the book took him in another direction after he interviewed Anne Levy, a Holocaust survivor who confronted Duke in the state capital. Captivated by Levy's story, Powell has produced a terrifying, poignant and finally a triumphant book about the Holoaust as witnessed through the life of one of its survisors, Anne Levy.

Troubled Memory is a beautifully written and tender account of a personal story that stands as an intimate history of Hitler's final solution. Powell's prose will carry you into the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos and into the vegetable bin where 6-year-old Anne and her sister hid from the SS. This is a book that makes the Holocaust relevant to every reader. It will fill you with horror and wonder, and it will move you to tears.

I am a student at Tulane University and have taken a seminar with Dr. Powell on the Holocaust. This book is the last book that he included on the syllabus for the course, and I understand fully how and why he wrote this book. At first I was a bit leery of his inclusion of his own work in the course, but the work is a great synthesis of traditional Holocaust study and how it pertains to American (particularly Southern) culture today.

The first half of the book largely provides a survey through a personal account of the sociopolitical landscape of World War II-era Eastern Europe: the reasons that the Holocaust occurred, bystanders, perpetrators and victims psychological profiles, as well as giving a very readable human interest story of the narrative of this one particular family. The second half picks up where most Holocaust narratives leave off: the post-war years, the family's emigration to America and the challenges that they faced in New Orleans as Holocaust Survivors, and finally, Anne Levy's battle against David Duke and the formation of the Louisiana Coalition against Nazism and Racism. The first half of the book is essential for understanding her drive in the second half of the book, and Dr. Powell does an excellent job in connecting traditional and new scholarship on just how frighteningly close Louisiana came to David Duke's authority and how important it is to be aware of the ideals that the Louisiana Coalition and Anne Levy espouse.

This book is written in a highly readable manner: the diction is not overly dense nor confusing and the personal story allows non-scholars to enjoy the material as much as a student of history or politics would. It is very obvious that Dr. Powell put an immense amount of personal effort and dedication into this account, and his contribution to the historical documentation of the Holocaust and its impact on contemporary society is a testimony to his skill as a historian.

Troubled Memory is the story of the Skorecki family, which survived the Hoocaust by escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto and going into hiding, intertwined with an accessible history of the Warsaw Ghetto. But is is also the story of Anne Skorecki Levy, 45 years later and transplanted to Louisiana, deciding that she doesn't want Klansman and Holocaust denier David Duke to become the governor of her state. On all three counts - as a tale of survival during the Holocaust, a history of that time and place and the story of little Anne Levy's dogged pursuit of the bigshot politician during his election campaign - the book reads like a taut thriller, a real page-turner from beginning to end.
In its linking of the Holocaust in Poland with the troubled racial history of the American South, Troubled Memory is reminiscent of Styron's Sophie's Choice - except that this is fact, not fiction. It's a compelling, genre-busting book that is not quite like anything you've read, and it leaves you both feeling good and with much to think about.

This story chronicles the survival of small Jewish girls who were hidden in an armoire by their desperate parents in the closing days of the Warsaw ghetto. It easily matches the personal resonance and innocent terror of the far more famous Anne Frank Story.

Even after their final liberation as perhaps the only intact nuclear family to survive that infamous ghetto, the Skorecki family was due one more date with history. Survival, it turns out, was the story within the story. Little Anne Skorecki Levi, the little girl who survived by staying silent inside that armoire struck a blow five decades later for Jewish survival by speaking out against Louisiana's Neo-Nazi gubernatorial candidate David Duke, and helping to engineer his electoral defeat.

This account of Anne's travel along the arc from victim to victor is an inspiration and a reminder that each of us can and must preserve our collective memory, however troubling.

I read books on the Holocaust to try to understand the times, the mileu, the horror, and the suffering. After more than 20 books, I realize that I can only scratch the surface. I will, however, never stop reading because of my fear that someday the deniers and the downgraders might get the upper hand.

Thank you to the the author and Anne Skorecki Levy for relating a story that is very, very moving as well as insightful and timely.