Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. This month I finished 7 books. Here are my thoughts on all of them:
1. NONFICTION AND HISTORY: The Nuremberg Trial by Ann Tusa and John Tusa
I mentioned this book last month and it is the most in-depth account of the Nuremberg Trial out there that I could find. It was published in 1984 and it is one that should still be read on the topic. The Nuremberg Trial tried 22 members of the defeated Third Reich in 1946. Among these were Martin Bormann, one of the closest men to Hitler in 1944-45, if not the closest, who controlled accessed to him, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, Hitler’s successor, Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the Air Force and Luftwaffe, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, Wilheim Keitel, one of Hitler’s most loyal soldiers, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and Albert Speer, the Fuhrer’s architect and a member of his inner circle.
All defendants were tried on four counts: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes. And after nine months, twelve defendants were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment and four to life imprisonments. Another three were acquitted. Bormann was tried in absentia; his body was never found and was probably killed by a Russian antitank shell when trying to escape from Berlin in 1945. He was formally pronounced dead by a West German court, however, in April 1973.
The book begins with an account of how the International Military Tribunal (IMT) was formed, the selection of the judges, and a description of the crimes the defendants were accused of. And then the authors recount the prosecutor’s case, the defendants’ case(s)—each one of the defendants and their lawyers presented their case—and finally the judgment. It also describes how each of the convicted war criminals sentenced to death were killed by hanging. The only one that was not present was Hermann Goering, who killed himself by arsenic poisoning the night before.
This book required a lot of research, and you can tell that the authors did their homework. And effectively, the study traces the trial’s legal, political and logistical problems whilst recreating the courtroom drama that took place during the nine months that this trial lasted (Goodreads page of The Nuremberg Trial). I highly recommend this book.
2. NONFICTION AND MEMOIR: Night by Elie Wiesel
I kept seeing this book in every list of “Must-Read Books” about WWII and picked up a copy. It is a short book and a quick read, but it indeed never loses its purpose making sure that nobody forgets what was happening in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the last few years of World War II. Its language is raw and it doesn’t shy away from describing the atrocities committed by those in power, the realities of war—sickness, death, and hunger— suffered by those on the losing side and the guilt of those who survived after the war is over, most keenly felt by the author as the sole survivor of his family. His mother’s death, his sisters’, and particularly his father’s, the only one he witnessed, eat at him because all he wanted to do when it happened and all that he was thinking about was to survive.
This is a short and quick read, but it is not an easy read. I had to put it down several times to process what happened in a chapter I had just read and didn’t pick it up again two or three days later. So beware of that in advance, but yes, this is a classic for a reason and highly recommend it as well.
3. ROMANCE AND CONTEMPORARY: One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
I’ll be honest, I tried to read this book before and DNF’d it several times. Taylor Jenkins Reid is such a popular author right now, with books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (which I read and thought was okay; too overhyped) and Daisy Jones & The Six, which was recently adapted for television. And that’s how I found out about this book. An adaptation starring Phillipa Soo, Simu Liu and Luke Bracey came out in 2023 and I wanted to see it. So I got the book and tried to read it before watching the movie, but I couldn’t get into it and DNF’d at least three times that I can remember.
If you’ve been with me for a while you know that romance and specifically contemporary romance is one of the hardest genres for me to actually finish. I DNF a lot of these books because I don’t connect with the main characters or simply don’t care enough to see them get together. In fact, I don’t care most of the time. But I love romance and that’s why I keep picking them up. I was finally able to stream the movie a couple of months ago and I liked it, so I decided to give the book a second chance.
And that’s precisely what this book is about: second chances. Specifically, a second chance at love after you lose your first one true love. You can have more than one. This book tackles issues such as death/loss of a loved one, grief, depression, and despair. But it also touches upon love in many of its forms: romantic love, love of family and self-love. Emma’s family was there for her when she first lost Jesse and that love helped her rediscover herself and love her new self again, which eventually led to her finding love again with Sam. They say that time heals all wounds but I think that love is also important in that equation, and this book reminds us about that.
I would’ve also liked to read this book from Jesse’s perspective and see how being lost at sea affected and changed him, but it was not Jesse’s story. It was Emma’s, and I’ll take what get. It was Emma’s journey to loving herself and finding love again. Another important topic in this book is how people change over time. This comes to the forefront when Jesse comes back and he refuses to see the new Emma. He is still stubbornly clinging to the old version of her, and it takes both of them time—time that they spend together in Maine—to realize that while Jesse might have been right for Emma four years ago, he isn’t right for her now and vice versa. And I liked how both of them accepted that in the end. Because it’s true. People change, and sometimes the healthiest thing to do in a relationship is to separate.
In the end, I decided to keep this one.
4. FANTASY AND MYTHOLOGY: Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Philips
I wanted to like this one more than I did, honestly. Yes, it has its funny moments and crass humor but it is not my favorite. In modern day London, all major Gods of Olympus live in a rundown townhouse wasting away with absolutely nothing to do because no one believes in them anymore; the only two gods that still work as they did when humans worshipped them in Antiquity are Ares and Hermes. The rest are just occupying space and bored out of their minds, especially Aphrodite and Apollo.
Here are my problems with this book. I did not like how Aphrodite and Apollo are portrayed, considering that love is ubiquitous and people still fall in love today and that the sun rises and sets every day. Apollo is so much more than a lecherous deviant and while Aphrodite does like to have sex, I don’t think she indulges in meaningless sex all that much just for the sake of having sex. She is always described in this book as either having sex (with Apollo or another god) or with clients on the phone and I hated that. I also did not like how the author portrays Athena. She is depicted here as a rambling woman who can’t find the words to say what she means all the time, and Athena is anything but.
The book ended up being a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with the added bonus that the gods of Olympus are once again worshipped by humanity and have recovered all their power. The God of Christianity, for his part, is set aside. I get that this book is urban fantasy and that it takes place in an alternate world where anything can happen, but it was not for me. It may even be a parody, and I have nothing against this genre, but no. I didn’t like this book.
5. HISTORICAL FICTION AND CLASSIC: Dawn by Elie Wiesel
This is the second book of Elie Wiesel’s The Night Trilogy and I didn’t even know this book existed until I was reading Night. This, however, is not a memoir but a short novel—less than 100 pages—about a young Holocaust survivor, Elisha, who becomes an Israeli freedom fighter in British-controlled Palestine after the war and who must now kill a captured English officer at dawn, hence the name of the book, in retribution for the British execution of a fellow freedom fighter. The novel is a night-long wait for morning during which the main character wrestles with guilt, ghosts, and God hour-by-hour until the appointed time when he must kill the enemy.
This book is a meditation on the mental havoc human beings suffer when they murder other human beings. Highly recommended.
6. HISTORICAL FICTION AND CLASSIC: Day by Elie Wiesel
This is the third book of Elie Wiesel’s The Night Trilogy. Originally published as The Accident, this book is about survivor guilt. A successful journalist and Holocaust survivor steps out in New York city with his girlfriend only to be hit by an oncoming taxi. Lying in the hospital between life and death, the nameless narrator questions the worth of living after having survived the Holocaust, the annihilation of an entire race and the loss of his religious faith. Did he choose death and step deliberately into the taxi’s way or was it really an accident? Why did he survive while so many others died?
This novel is harrowing and you can feel the narrator’s physical and emotional pain. He can’t let go of all the dead because he too is dead, his body just doesn’t know it yet.
I highly recommend this book as well.
7. HISTORICAL FICTION AND BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS: The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes
This book is the story of three women—Vivian Childs, Althea James and Hannah Brencht—whose love of books and hatred against censorship and book banning brings them together in 1944 to fight against a powerful senator’s bid to control what books are sent out to men at the front. Vivian is the first one to pick this battle but later she finds Althea and Hannah, both of whom were present at the Nazi book burning in front of the Reichstag on May 10, 1933. On this date, all books deemed “un-German” were publicly burned throughout the country. That year, Althea was a young American writer who receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and one of the most powerful men in his inner circle, to visit Berlin following the success of her debut novel. After meeting a beautiful woman who promises to show her the “real” Berlin though, Althea soon finds herself drawn to a group of resisters who make her question everything about her hosts and herself.
Among those resisters is Hannah, who forms a bond with Althea and who soon finds herself falling in love with the young American. Until Hannah’s brother is arrested and then killed three years later. Adam’s death weighs heavily on Hannah and she can’t help but think that he might still be alive if she hadn’t let her guard down and let the American in. Hannah’s story begins in 1936, Althea’s in 1933, and Vivian’s in 1944, the year in which all three women meet.
I picked this book up because I am an avid lover of books, and not many books address the issue of censorship and book banning in fiction even though it is still a relevant issue today in our schools. Yes, it is yet another historical fiction book set in WWII, but I think that it is worth reading it for the issues it tries to address and bring to the forefront. Albeit the writing is simple and easy to read, so don’t expect anything with too much depth to it. The book’s purpose, ultimately, is to entertain and you can tell with the little bit of romance added to the story. I liked both couples in this story; they, however, were not that relevant to the plot. The most important thing is to create consciousness on the persecution of authors and artists whose opinions oppose an ideology, in this case, Nazi ideology, but which is still a relevant and a rampant issue almost 100 years after the end of the war.
That is everything this month. Thank you for stopping by.
