Kirkus Star
THE KIRKUS STAR
Awarded to Books of Exceptional Merit

BROWSE BOOK REVIEWS




Elie Wiesel


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Cover art for DAWN
FICTION
Released: April 1, 1961
by Elie Wiesel, translated by Frances Frenaye

"Perhaps not a popular form- or theme, but it leaves an inevitable impress."
A spare, spectral short novel follows last year's Night and fills in the hours before dawn spent by Elisha, 18, designated to kill an Englishman- in Palestine- at the time when reprisals were ordered: for the hanging of every Jewish fighter, there was to be the execution of an Englishman. Read full book review >
Cover art for THE TOWN BEYOND THE WALL
FICTION
Released: May 20, 1964

"The sufferings of the Jews (or of humanity) are introverted here into a picture something like the back-view of one of hagall's tortured prophets."
The victim is saying his Prayers — Prayers directed towards a God he has never really found in all his obsessive fanatic searches for Him. Read full book review >
Cover art for THE GATES OF THE FOREST
FICTION
Released: May 26, 1966

"It has all been said before but Mr. Wiesel puts it down as well as anyone."
Translated from the French by Francis Frenaye, this is a novel about the face of the Jewish people and the challenge to the face of one Jew—a Hungarian called Gregor. Read full book review >
Cover art for A BEGGAR IN JERUSALEM
FICTION
Released: Jan. 26, 1969

"For many, a meaningful prophecy."
Throughout his published works, Wiesel, unique among Jewish authors who have survived the holocaust, has continually moved forward into the current Jewish experience, joining terror to hope, death to continuity, anonymity to identity. Read full book review >
Cover art for ONE GENERATION AFTER
FICTION
Released: Nov. 16, 1970

"Wiesel's tales, lectures and commemorative griefs are moving, penetrating, often raspingly excessive — the result perhaps of attempting an honest stance before the inexplicable."
To convey the truth of the holocaust in its totality...(the writer) must add as well the silence left behind by millions of unknowns...One cannot conceive of the holocaust except as a mystery, begotten by the dead." Read full book review >
Cover art for THE OATH
FICTION
Released: Nov. 15, 1973
by Elie Wiesel, translated by Marion Wiesel

"Demanding and rewarding."
Again Wiesel's richly somber, close and faintly cantorial prose flows over and repolishes the same impenetrable mysteries: that the massacre of innocents transmits a lifelong burden to the survivor; and that the survivor, both doomed and blessed, is forced to confront the knowledge of death which is "not a solution but a question, the most human question of all." Read full book review >