The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch - A Guest Review

The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch
Published November 2011 by Create Space Independent Publishing Platform
Source: our copy courtesy of the author in exchange for this review

There are two books by Jon Clinch on my book shelves, Finn and now The Thief of Auschwitz. I bought the first, I requested a review copy of the second, both for me to read. I have yet to read either. Finn was read by my dad and he liked it a lot; now this one was immediately grabbed up by The Big Guy. My impression from what they have each said is that these books need to stay in my house and I need to make time for them.

Author's Summary:

Told in two intertwining narratives, The Thief of Auschwitz takes readers on a dual journey: one into the death camp at Auschwitz with Jacob, Eidel, Max, and Lydia Rosen; the other into the heart of Max himself, now an aged but extremely vital—and outspoken—survivor. Max is a renowned painter, and he’s about to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. The truth, though, is that he’s been keeping a crucial secret from the art world—indeed from the world at large, and perhaps even from himself—all his life long. The Thief of Auschwitz reveals that secret, along with others that lie in the heart of a family that’s called upon to endure—together and separately—the unendurable.

The Big Guy's Thoughts:

Interesting read.  Wasn't sure I was in the mood to delve into a book about a concentration camp as they are not usually terribly upbeat.  This book however does not dwell on the thousands of bodies in the camp, but rather the people and relationships, in particular the prisoners and the capo or trustees who bully the other residents of the camp. 

While not exactly upbeat and not a happy ending per se, the story is not overwhelming.  The descriptions are interesting and appear accurate to the times with predominately the family and a few others woven into the tale.  The author had a nicely flowing and very believable writing style and I could tell he has written some other good novels as discussed on the back cover. 

Overall a very well written book that I would recommend to anyone over the age of 16, both male and female. 

Thanks for the review, Big Guy - and nothing in it that even made me roll my eyes!

Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Bookish Memories

This week the ladies at The Broke and The Bookish have asked us to share our top ten best bookish memories. Here goes, in now particular order, my favorite bookish memories:

1. Sitting in the hallway of my parents house with my dad and my siblings while my dad, in his theatrical way of reading, read us great classic books including Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I know it wasn't the only time he ever read to us; they are just the times that stick out foremost in my memories.

2. Hours and hours in the library of Eastridge Elementary School, back when a library was a library and not a media center. My very smart teachers figured out pretty quickly that this girl would work hard to earn extra time there. Some of my favorite finds there were these booklets of plays we were allowed to perform on Friday afternoons. I wish I could remember what those books were called!

3. It's seems odd to think now, but I still vividly recall getting a lot of the books I got as a child. We didn't have as many books in ye olden days so books were a real treasure. I remember opening Little Women, Little Men, James and the Giant Peach, Heidi, and The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew. Yep, I was raised on books that even then were classics. Now wonder I love them still.

4. Charles H. Gere Branch Library: hours in the summer finding books for the summer reading program; hours in middle school doing research with friends...and flirting with the boys who were there "doing homework," too. Sorry, Mom!

5. Reading with my own children (including out in the hall, sitting on the floor between bedrooms) has spawned a myriad of memories, tiny little gems of moments. One of the standouts was when Mini-me and I were nearing the end of E.B. White's The Trumpet of The Swan and I realized there were tears in his eyes. Not necessarily because the book was so sad (I don't even recall now if it was at that point) but because the book was nearly done. He had fallen that deeply into the book that he couldn't bear to see it end. I was sad for him but also so happy that he was going to grow up loving books that much.

6. When Mini-him was little and there weren't so many grandchildren to adore and they weren't all running off to play with each other, there used to be time for my dad to sit with Mini-him and read. They didn't sit on the floor in the hall any more but snuggled together in a chair or on the sofa. Mini-him, uncharacteristically, rapt as his grandpa turned him on to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn just as he had me more than 20 years earlier. To this day, it remains one of Mini-him's favorite books.

7. In the fall of 2010, the editors of Omaha.net asked if I'd be interested in attending (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest and writing an article. What? There's a lit fest in Omaha? Heck yes, I was interested. I raved about the lit fest often enough in the past couple of years for you all to know how impressed I was that year by the writers, by the panel topics, and by the efforts of the organizers. You will most especially recall how it sparked an rekindled interest in fairy tales and launched Fairy Tale Fridays. I was so disappointed to have to miss it this year!

8.  I began interacting with author Jennie Nash on her blog after reading her book The Last Beach Bungalow and we struck up a fun correspondence that resulted in her asking me if I would like a copy of her then soon-to-be published book The Threadbare Heart. A few days later, a package arrived at my door. It is no exaggeration to say that I squealed, teared up a little and yes, I may actually have hugged the package for a while before I even opened it. Of course, you all know this story already - I've written about it several times!

9. Some months after that first Omaha Lit Fest, I saw in the paper that author Mary Helen Stefaniak would be speaking at a local indie bookstore. I grabbed my daughter (kicking and screaming) and insisted that we couldn't possibly not support an author coming to town. After all, I'd heard Stefaniak speak at the Lit Fest and was thrilled to get to see her again so soon. Imagine my surprise, then, to have her introduced as being a teacher at Creighton University, right here in Omaha. Seriously. A real, published author from right here in Omaha. Okay, I knew she wasn't the only one but still.

10. A few months after that I worked up the nerve to contact Stefaniak to see if she'd be interested in speaking with the Omaha Bookworms. Not only was she interested, she actually came to the meeting. This lovely woman took time out of her own life to spend the evening charming the book club and joining us in a wonderful discussion of her book The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia as well as joining us in cheering the St. Louis Cardinals on in the World Series. Really, authors are just people, too. Sort of.

Stefaniak, covering her face, as we tease her about being the star of the show

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion by Jane Austen
Published: 1816
Source: I read from my omnibus edition of Austen's works and on my Nook

Persuasion: a process aimed at changing a person's (or a group's) attitude or behavior toward some event, idea, object, or other person(s), by using written or spoken words to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination thereof.

 Eight years ago, 19-year-old Anne Elliot fell deeply in love with Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer. But her pompous, elitist father and equally snobbish older sister disapprove of a marriage between the two, feeling Wentworth is not worthy of the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall. But it is the opinion of Lady Russell, a dear family friend acting in the capacity of mother to Anne, who persuades the young girl to break off her engagement.

Now 27, Anne is forced to come face-to-face with the man she snubbed when his sister and her husband lease Kellynch Hall. Sir Walter's spendthrift ways have forced him out of his home and he and daughter, Elizabeth, have moved to Bath leaving Anne to move from place to place. Spending time with sister Mary and her in-laws, the Musgroves; a trip to Lyme that introduces new faces into Anne's life: and time in Bath with friends and family cause Anne to experience a full range of emotions. But, as with all of Austen's novels, good will triumph.

I read Persuasion as part of a readalong hosted by Wallace of The Unputdownables. I spent the entire time playing catch up due to a very slow start. It's all well and good to have all of an author's works in one book but it makes for miserable reading. My book was so heavy I hated to hold it to read and the pages were so large and the writing so small that I never felt like I was getting any where. And to that the fact that this may be Austen's slowest developing novel.

I've read Persuasion before and found it so be in what I would consider the bottom tier of Austen's works for me. A reread hasn't changed my opinion much. Anne is certainly Austen's most passive heroine; not until late in the book does she finally start to try to make things happen for herself. And never once does she stand up to anyone, something I've always admired in Austen's females, particularly in light of the time the books were written.

Still, even a lesser Austen novel is better than most books. Imagine being a woman who has the temerity to absolutely skewer the upper class at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sir Walter is so vain that Captain Croft is forced to remove numerous mirrors from Sir Walter's dressing room when the Crofts move into Kellynch Hall. Elizabeth and Sir Walter take a friend, Mrs. Clay, along with them to Bath but even so continue to make it clear that they consider her below them.

Family is no less a target of Austen's bite. Sisters who insist that the best of the three of them is the least useful, family who thinks it's just as well that a son died in war because he was never going to amount to anything anyway, cousins who can only associate with each other under certain circumstances because of their different places in society.

Austen became ill during the writing of Persuasion and according to some sources was unable to polish it in the same way as her other books. Perhaps that accounts for me liking it less. I will probably never reread it - on the other hand, I will never get rid of my copy. After all, if I ever find myself stranded on a desert island, my omnibus edition of Austen's works will be with me!

Sunday Salon - February 3

Happy Super Bowl Sunday! As much as I love football, I'm not all that enthusiastic about this game -  I don't care who wins and I really don't like the Harbaugh brothers. Could both of their teams lose?

Here's What I'm:

Listening To: The music from Broadway musicals - it's like comfort food for my ears. Although I will say that Pandora disappoints me here - I listened to the Andrew Lloyd Weber station yesterday for a couple of hours and never heard a single song from any of his shows other than Phantom.

Watching: "Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" with Mini-him and his girlfriend. It's an odd movie, starts out funny and then turns very quiet and serious. I think I liked it; it just wasn't what I was expecting especially after the first 30 minutes.

Reading: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan for book club, Les Miserables for the readalong that continues through February, and, on audio, City of Women by David Gillham which I am absolutely loving. 

Making: Yesterday I made a chocolate cake using a recipe that's been in my husband's family for more than 50 years. It's what sounded good to my mother-in-law and right now, she gets whatever she wants. Today I'm making her fettucine alfredo.

Planning: Project: The Things That Feed My Soul (see Friday's post).

Grateful for: Compassionate medical professionals.

Loving: The forecast for the coming week: everyday has a high in the forties except one. Spring is on the way!

Thinking: Sometimes life is just not fair. And sometimes it is really, really not fair.

Looking forward to: A second day in a row with several hours of having the house to myself. I love my family more than I could ever say but some days it's nice not to see any of them for a while!

What's on your schedule this week? Have you read anything I should be adding to my wish list?

Project - The Things That Feed My Soul

The "Life" part of Lit and Life? Today that's what I'm thinking about. I've been forced lately to do some thinking about possessions - which things do you really need to live, which things do you need to feed your soul?

My mother-in-law has had some health issues in the past couple of months that have necessitated us beginning to think about moving her to a much smaller place. We've had to consider what she "needs" physically and what she "needs" to make a new place feel like home. She cannot take her dining room set, her piano, her couch. Likewise, nothing in her second bedroom. But she absolutely must take the Eskimo sculpture that her husband brought back from a trip he took to Alaska and which has sat on her hearth for 40 years.

This got me to thinking...if we had to downsize, and I mean really downsize, what things would I absolutely have to take with me, which things say "home" to me, which things feed my soul?


Then I thought of Jennie Nash's The Threadbare Heart in which the lead character's home is destroyed in a wildfire. She finds herself need to make a list of the things that were lost (including such mundane things as a bathmat) but also grateful for the things her husband had time to save, including a piece of antique lace from her grandmother. I began thinking about what I would save if I knew my home was going to be destroyed and I had one hour to save as much as I could.

These are things you can't really decide last minute, there are too many decisions to be made, too many priorities to be set. Hence, Project - The Things That Feed My Soul was born. I haven't worked out all of the details: I haven't set a timeline for completing the project. What I do know is that it starts with going through every room, really looking at what's in it.

Some things are a given: our photos, scrapbooks, family history archives are going on both lists. The secretary that was my grandmother's treasure will move with me where ever I go as well as the rocking chair I used to rock all of my children to sleep when they were babies. Unless, of course, it's not already been passed on to rock my grandbabies to sleep!

I'll be updating my progress here as I go, perhaps as part of my Sunday Salon posts. Have you ever thought about what you would save in a fire? What you would take with you no matter where you go?  I'd love to hear about the things that feed your soul and why.