Books: The Lost
by rrusczyk, May 20, 2008, 12:49 PM
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
In this book, the author, in great detail, chronicles his search for what happened to his grandfather's brother's family in the Holocaust. Had I not read or seen so much about the Holocaust already, or if I were really into genealogy, I might have found this book more interesting. Better yet, if the book were 200 pages shorter, I might not have relatively skimmed so much. (Score a point for speedreading.)
Mendelsohn's writing itself is quite good, so I'll probably pick up another book by him if it's about a subject that's more interesting to me or more unusual -- there are enough books out there about the Holocaust or of a person writing about their family... I do wonder -- where are all those books about other groups who have suffered something like what the Jews suffered in WWII? The Ukranians in the 1930s? The Armenians in the early 1900s? Cambodians under Pol Pot? Chinese in the Great Leap Forward? Rwanda? And on and on. . . I wonder if what's going on here is a weird kind of racism based on the perpetrators, rather than the victims (though, admittedly, there are more prominent Jewish people in the media than there are Ukranians, Armenians, Cambodians, etc., which is, of course, the more obvious explanation -- but that's not the only explanation, since it doesn't explain why so many Holocaust stories sell so much better than a movie about, say, Ukranians being starved in their villages would).
In this book, the author, in great detail, chronicles his search for what happened to his grandfather's brother's family in the Holocaust. Had I not read or seen so much about the Holocaust already, or if I were really into genealogy, I might have found this book more interesting. Better yet, if the book were 200 pages shorter, I might not have relatively skimmed so much. (Score a point for speedreading.)
Mendelsohn's writing itself is quite good, so I'll probably pick up another book by him if it's about a subject that's more interesting to me or more unusual -- there are enough books out there about the Holocaust or of a person writing about their family... I do wonder -- where are all those books about other groups who have suffered something like what the Jews suffered in WWII? The Ukranians in the 1930s? The Armenians in the early 1900s? Cambodians under Pol Pot? Chinese in the Great Leap Forward? Rwanda? And on and on. . . I wonder if what's going on here is a weird kind of racism based on the perpetrators, rather than the victims (though, admittedly, there are more prominent Jewish people in the media than there are Ukranians, Armenians, Cambodians, etc., which is, of course, the more obvious explanation -- but that's not the only explanation, since it doesn't explain why so many Holocaust stories sell so much better than a movie about, say, Ukranians being starved in their villages would).
February 2012
January 2012