Book Review: Tales from the Secret Annex

by Anne Frank

Tales from the Secret Annex is a collection of short stories and essays that Anne Frank wrote to pass her time while hiding from the Nazis. The essays are actually diary snippets her father had chosen not to publish with the rest of her diary entries.

The writing in the short stories is very much that of a thirteen-year-old girl, but below the simplistic sentence structure lies complex thoughts and an understanding of the world beyond her years. The stories are also quite imaginative.

The essays are where Anne really stands out. After all, her fame is based on the diary entries her father did publish. With topics like cheating in French class and arguments with and her thoughts on the Van Daams, her rebelliousness isn't quite up to today's standards, but I do find her honesty and writing style quite endearing.

I found The Sing of Inequity to be the most profound. In this page and a half essay, Anne challenges the prudishness of her compatriots in Amsterdam by writing:

"I don't think we're so very different from nature. And since we people are apart of nature, why should we be ashamed of the way nature has dressed us?"

Why not just be naked? What is wrong with the human form?

 In Happiness Anne states that:

"I had learned that most sadness comes from joy."
 

I don't think most adults have learned this concept, so to see it in the private writings of a 13 year old is astounding to me. It's almost as if the wisdom of a full like was granted to her before her untimely death.

This was an interesting read from a historical standpoint. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in Anne Frank.

Book Review: The Giver

 

By Lois Lowry

 

The Giver opens in a bland, generic society where people are ssigned careers (because Big Brother knows best) and given medication to suppress sexual feelings and closes on the promise of color, warmth, and, most of all, love.

 

In between Lowry tells the story full of social and political undertones. It's intent is clear--to scare people away from the slippery slope that woud lead to a society like this. For example, when Jonas expressed his concerns about his upcoming assignment, Lowry reveals that the job of Birthmother "was an important job, if lacking in prestige." That's really not much different from now. Birthmothers in this society lived a cushioned lifestyle for three years while they birth three children then they assigned to back-breaking manual labor until their retirement. Birthmothers are only valued for their one attribute and weren't allowed a family of their own.

 

While Birthmothers weren't valued, women in general were. The current Chief Elder was a woman and Jonas's mother had a higher position that his father. I found this an interesting aspect of the story, but women don't always need to be cast completely aside for the society's policies and practices to not be in women's best inerest.

 

When Jonas receives his assignment as the Receiver, we learn the qualities that will make him ideal for the job: intelligence, integrity, courage, wisdom and the ability to See Beyond. In giving up safety and all he has known, Jonas exudes these characteristics, so we can look at the announcement of these characteristics as foreshadowing. They were to eventually play a crucial role in the story.

 

Like most dystopian novels, the society in The Giver isn't completely evil (in some dystopian stories the society may be evil but was often founded for good). No one starves. Everyone has a home. For the most part, everyone is equal, except they were allowed to be individuals when it came to volunteering. The volunteer positions the citizens chose impacted their eventual assignments.

 

This book was enjoyable, but its ending was too blunt. Although this is a series, a little more resolution would have been ideal. I do recommend it. It's a quick, thought-provoking read.

Book Review: The Five People You Meet In Heaven

By Mitch Albom

OK. I’ll admit it. After Tuesday’s with Morrie encouraged bored people to interact with senior citizens from their past, I thought this book was a spiritual self-help book. I was wrong, but it happens from time to time.

This was an interesting story. I particularly liked how the MC’s life was recounted by the five people he met in heaven.

The reader had a good voice; he had perfected the low-class New York accent required of the MC well.

Overall, this was a good, quick book.

Book Review: Aleph

By Paulo Coehlo

Because of my great love for Isabel Allende, www.literature-map.com suggested that I give Paulo Coehlo a try. I planned to read The Alchemist or Veronika Decides to Die, but I happened upon this book on the “New Books” shelf at the front of the library.

This book was hard to enjoy. I had to force myself to like it. For about the first half, I thought it was a supernatural memoir. Then I noticed the back cover said Fiction, but according to a New York Times interview with Coehlo from September 2011, this was his experience on a train across Siberia in 2006. I can’t put into words how sad this made me. Viewing it as fictional was the only thing that got me through the book.

The story itself is interesting, if viewed in the context of being purely fictional. The writing was a bit boring and lacked true style and eloquence. That contributed to my difficulties reading the book.

I would not recommend this book, but it wasn’t bad enough that I’d never read his other works.