The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl is Frank’s personal diary kept during the two years spent in hiding in a small apartment in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. Upon hearing the Dutch government was seeking out personal accounts of the conflict for later publication, she wrote and rewrote many passages with the intention…
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Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje Warlight is a story about a young teen’s formative years in England immediately after WWII, but it’s more complicated than that. Our narrator, Nathaniel, looks back to when his parents, sent to Asia for a work position, left his older sister and him in the care of their secretive lodger. They start…
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Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began

by Art Spiegelman I was a bit concerned when Maus II began with a big text dump in which Spiegelman expresses his apprehensions going into the project, along with inadequacies he felt growing up. Of course, this soon enough makes way to his father, Vladek, up to his old miserly shenanigans again, and I could…
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Maus I: My Father Bleeds History

by Art Spiegelman Man, first Ablutions and then this; I really don’t know what I was thinking. I need to read something light and happy next, to help wash this wave of despair away. (Save me, Wodehouse!) Though, to be perfectly honest, I’ll probably be reading the second instalment of Maus immediately after this one,…
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The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior

by Ernest Zimmermann It may seem a stretch to believe that an intriguing statement was all it took to launch the late Ernest Zimmermann, then a history professor at Lakehead University, into countless hours of research and investigation that eventually led to the publishing of The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior, but that’s the…
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Night

by Elie Wiesel “We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything––death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth.” I tend to stray…
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A Stone for Benjamin

by Fiona Gold Kroll Some stories speak more of their author than their subject matter. I truly believe that A Stone for Benjamin is an instance of this. Kroll shows much of her positive outlook when she romanticizes the unknown man in the image she has seen her entire life; what comes across is a strong woman…
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