LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Review by Anthony King @ Bay Windows

Night by Elie Wiesel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Whether you are a fan of Oprah’s or not, you have to give her credit for at least trying to get us to read. Coming off the heels of the controversy with her last book club selection (A Million Little Pieces by ‘creative’ writer James Frey), Oprah’s next pick is Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical work of the Holocaust. It’s a good move, as nobody is going to question this book. It was first published in 1958 and slowly became one of the leading memoirs of the Holocaust. The edition published for Oprah is the latest, of course, and is translated by Marion Wiesel, who does most of the translating for her husband’s work. The laureate Elie Wiesel was born in Romania in 1928, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, and continues to write today (including 2005’s The Time of the Uprooted). In Night, the reader follows the 15-year-old Wiesel as he is forced with his family from his home in Romania and sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and one sister die. He questions humanity, survival and even the notion of God.