FEBRUARY WRAP UP: What I Read This Month

Hi everyone! Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’m reviewing the books I read in February. I read 7 books last month. Here are my thoughts on all of them:

1. NONFICTION AND SCIENCE: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

When I picked this book up, I was expecting a (short) scientific account of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis (TB), and the history of how medicine has worked hard to combat it but this is not we get. What we get, instead, is a glimpse (a very small one but nonetheless very affecting glimpse) of the lives of people with TB.

Tuberculosis is nowhere near eradicated despite us having an effective vaccine against it. Every time I go to the pediatricians’ office for my daughters’ annual wellness check, I get a form asking me if either one of them experienced any symptoms of TB in the last year. But that’s pretty much it. I don’t hear anything else about TB beyond that for the rest of the year, until I have to fill out that same form again on the following yearly appointment. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who does this every year at the pediatrician’s office. TB is just not at the forefront of our minds, and we barely even think about it most of the time.

Yet it is here, and it has killed millions of people for thousands of years.

John Green is a popular YA fiction author. His most popular books are Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Your Stars; I have not read any of his other books, but I do commend him for using his platform and megaphone to remind his readers about TB and let them know that it is still here: “TB has killed around one in seven people who’ve ever lived. Covid-19 displaced tuberculosis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease from 2020 through 2022, but in 2023, TB once again became our deadliest infection. What’s different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and it has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world” simply because “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not (Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green).” And the implications of this are mind boggling.

This book is written in a simple and accessible manner. But what is more important, it does an excellent job at telling the story of Henry, a young man with TB from Lakka, Sierra Leona, and in whose story, we (as readers) become invested in right away. In other words, the author’s narrative style allows us to instantly connect with Henry and we want to see him heal and beat TB to the end. Nonetheless, I do think that the book is overhyped due to the author’s popularity and the fact that many people instantly buy anything he comes out with. Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the author for using this to conscientize his readers about TB, and that is good, but the book is still overhyped. I’m glad I read it, but I doubt that I will ever pick it up again.

2. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed every year on January 27^th to commemorate the deaths of six million Jews and others killed by the Nazi Regime. January 27^th 1945 is the day Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. When I saw this on the calendar, I decided to pick up Laurence Rees’s highly praised The Holocaust: A New History.

Now, why “A New History”? The author says, “When I was writing this book, I benefited from meeting hundreds of people who experienced the Holocaust personally, both as survivors and perpetrators, and it is their testimony, most of which has never been published or appeared in book form before, that warrants the subtitle of “A New History” for this book” (The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees). Published after twenty-five years spent meeting eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust, Rees wrote a “compelling, highly readable explanation of how and why the Holocaust happened” (Ian Kershaw, author of To Hell and Back) and “he combines never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and authoritative account of the Holocaust.”

This book is indeed highly readable and accessible. It begins in September 1919, when Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow soldier of immense historical significance. This letter is “the first irrefutable evidence of Hitler’s antisemitic beliefs” and the probable starting point of Germany’s (and of its inhabitants) intensified hatred toward the Jews in the world war years. In 1919, Hitler was a nobody but he drew from thousands of years of persecution and antisemitism to identify an adversary to his cause: the Jew, whom he called “a racial tuberculosis among nations.”

Important milestones in the history of the Holocaust such as Kristallnacht and other pogroms, the T4 program, and the death of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution and whose assassination launched Operation Reinhard; that is, the creation of three death camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, in retaliation, are all mentioned in this book, but the author never shifts his lens from the consequences that all of these events had for the Jews: suffering and death. “The extermination of the Jews,” he says, “was a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race”, and he never makes you forget that. That is why the testimony of all of these eyewitnesses, whether they were victims or the perpetuators of those horrors, is so important. Their words are a reminder of what happened 80 years ago, and it is important that people don’t forget that so it doesn’t happen again. Books like this are an antidote to humankind’s short memory and should be read.

I highly recommend this book.

3. NONFICTION AND MEMOIR: The Survivor: How I Made It Through Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter by Josef Lewkowicz

This is the memoir of a Holocaust survivor. He survived six concentration camps and, after the liberation, he hunted down Amon Goeth, one of the most murderous SS camp commandants of the Nazi Regime: “He recounted finding Goeth, the man who had brutalized and murdered countless fellow prisoners, in person: ‘When I saw him, [he was] lying on the ground, on the dirt, dressed like a beggar, half of his [former] size. I recognized him right away. I saw that murderer’s face, I knew it very, very well’” (The Jewish Chronicle). Josef Lewkowicz died in December 2024. He was 98 years old, and he spent most of his post-war life rebuilding his life and helping other survivors. He, however, was the sole survivor of his family: “My mother, my siblings, my uncles, my whole family were brought there … into those chambers and gassed them” (Padraig Moran, CBC Radio).

This book could be roughly divided in 4 parts: Lewkowicz’s life in Poland before the war and how he and his family lived as law-abiding citizens and Jews committed to their faith, Lewkowicz’s fight for survival in six different concentration camps during the war, his quest to hunt Nazi’s after the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, and his post-war life helping other survivors.

Memoirs are history, and I picked this up to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Personally, I read books about WWII and the Holocaust because I want to teach my daughters about it one day; to let them know that it happened. It’s been 80 years since, and that is a long time for human memory. It does not remember. I did not fight in the war and I do not have family members that fought in the war; I also do not know anyone who has suffered or have family members who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust, yet I do think that older generations shouldn’t stop talking about it. That is why I think that Josef Lewkowicz’s death (and that of very Holocaust survivor) is such a loss to humanity. Because newer generations don’t know, and they won’t know if we don’t tell them. They haven’t lived in the past, so they don’t have the wisdom of experience. And if we don’t tell them, history repeats itself.

Mind you, past wars aren’t the only ones we should talk about. Current ones too. Someone once told me that they didn’t like history because it was the history of the victor, and that most of it was lies. Yes. But history shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored precisely because the victor tells lies. Those on the other side need to raise their voices and yell out the truth as loud as they can, and that is what Josef Lewkowicz was doing.

I don’t rate memoirs but I do recommend this one. Although it is not one of my top recommendations.

4. CHILDREN’S CLASSICS: Frog and Toad Storybook Favorites by Arnold Lobel

I love Frog and Toad, and I have loved Frog and Toad since the first grade. And I picked this book up to read to my daughters at night and now they too love Frog and Toad. If you have kids, I highly recommend this one. The writing is simple and yet profound. Philosophical even, and I am very happy that my daughters have found a deep love for these two characters just as I did when I was 6 years old.

5. EPIC FANTASY: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

I have read Brandon Sanderson before, but this is my first Brandon Sanderson book. Let me explain: I first heard about Brandon Sanderson when I was reading the Wheel of Time and I read The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight. Unfortunately, I DNF’d the entire series with one book left to finish. Years later, I tried to pick up Mistborn and I couldn’t read it. I didn’t read much of it to say that I DNF’d it, but the prose was very different to what I had read from him before in The Wheel of Time that it jarred me out of my senses. I was expecting a narrative style in Mistborn that was just not there. And I know that Sanderson, after Jordan’s death, did not want to intrude and tried to keep Jordan’s style in the last three books of the Wheel of Time, so it was not his voice I was reading but I do believe that Sanderson’s narrative style isn’t for me. I, however, didn’t want to give up entirely on Sanderson yet. I still wanted to read Warbreaker, which had been on my TBR for a very long time.

Now I have, and I won’t deny that I had some issues with it (read my full review here). Brandon Sanderson is not my favorite fantasy author. Will I try to read any more of his other books set in the Cosmere universe? I don’t know yet. Maybe, but for now I will take a break from Sanderson for a while.

6. ROMANCE AND CLASSICS OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE: Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto por Mario Vargas Llosa (English Translation: The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa)

This book is a reread from my college years, and I didn’t like it. I loved it before but this time around it was my worst read of the month. I picked this book up as my romance read for the month of February in one of my book clubs, but it is not a HEA romance (I knew that going into it though). I didn’t like any of the characters, and though the main characters were deeply in love, they were also unlikeable. They are terrible people. Granted, Vargas Llosa’s use of ecphrasis is superb in this novel and as a whole it is a manifesto of sex through art and literature. Sex is beautiful, I agree. And when it is done by two people who are deeply in love, like these two, even more so. But Rigoberto, Lucrecia, and Fonchito are just awful people and I couldn’t root for any of them. Read my full review for this book here.

7. HISTORICAL FICTION AND WORLD WAR II: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

This book was a surprise read for me because I didn’t like the other book I read by this author before. Yet this one is very good. It is the story of an unnamed Japanese-American family banished from their quiet life in Berkeley to spend over three years in an internment camp for a simple “crime” of being Japanese in the US during World War II. The irony is that the US, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, also interred the enemy in concentration camps during the war, just as the Germans did. And yet, the Germans were the only ones put on trial for it because they were the ones who lost the war. Granted, some may say that internment camps are not the same as concentration camps, but they are. Some concentration camps though were also extermination camps.

The fact of the matter is that when you get labeled as “the Other”, you suffer immeasurable pain and sorrow. And this has repeated itself in history innumerable times: West vs. East, European vs. Indigenous, Victor vs. Defeated, Christianity vs. Paganism, etc., and it keeps repeating itself. This book is poignant because it not only tells the story of that one Japanese-American family, which could be any Japanese-American family in the US, but the detached narrative style that Otsuka uses also reminds us that Japanese-Americans have not been the only ones to be considered as “the Other” throughout history. There have been others, and just like them, we too can be seen as such in the future.

I highly recommend this book.

That is everything for now. Thank you for stopping by.