Books, Books, Books: Part Three

One person gave me these three books! It's extraordinary to say that I have never read Night by Elie Wiesel, which is now assigned in high school (9th to 12th grade):

It is 1944. The Jews of Sighet, Hungary are rounded up and driven into Nazi concentration camps. For the next terrible year, young Elie Wiesel experiences the loss of everything he loves — home, friends, family — in an agonizing journey through Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald. The greatest tragedy of our time, told through the eyes of a 15-year old boy.

Night is a terrifying account of the Nazi death-camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family, his innocence, and his god. Penetrating and powerful, as personal as The Diary of Anne Frank, Night awakens the shocking memory of evil at its absolute and carries with it the unforgettable message that this horror must never be allowed to happen again.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

Nor have I read anything in French for awhile:

This is the first mystery Simenon wrote with Inspector Jules Maigret! I guess if I can't read it in French, I'll have to buy the "crib"from Penguin!

And, in keeping with my other post today on the state/fate of Notre-Dame de Paris, it seems appropriate to highlight this book too:

According to Pan Macmillan:

In this wonderfully readable book, Alistair Horne tells the huge and romantic story of Paris through seven ages of turmoil and change: the Middle Ages, the 100 years war, the Paris of Louis XIV, the age of Napoleon, the Commune, the Empire days of Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie, and the First World War and De Gaulle. Interweaving historical narrative with telling detail, this is a fluent and definitive work of social and cultural history.

Soon, I'll let you know about my favorite books read in 2019!

A Brief Encounter and A New Publication

Last week my husband and I went to the Spiritual Life Center to attend one of the "Dinners with the Doctors" presentations--Erin Doom of the Eighth Day Institute on St. John of Damascus--and enjoyed the evening very much. Toward the end of the Q and A, a lady came in and sat at one of the tables; she looked familiar. At the conclusion of the presentation, she came over and asked, "Don't I know you?"

She was my college French instructor (15 hours of college credit)! Mark and I had also known her and her husband at the Newman Center at WSU and at our home parish at Blessed Sacrament. She lives in France, in the Moselle region, but visits the USA often. She was at the Spiritual Life Center for a retreat before going to visit some friends in Florida for Christmas. It's one of those coincidences: if we hadn't attended and if she hadn't come into the room (helping with some clean up as part of her retreat), we wouldn't have reconnected.

One of the things we mentioned to her was that we had been able to travel to Paris so many times since we had last seen her. Mark talked about how much her French lessons had helped me on those trips. We exchanged business cards and parted. On our way home, Mark and I reminisced about our college years at WSU. Who knows if we'll ever see her again! She commented that she hopes we'll visit France again soon.

There's my segue into mentioning that I've had an article accepted in a brand new publication, Faith & Culture. It's the Journal of The Augustine Institute, edited by Joseph Pearce. He had accepted an article on Paris for the St. Austin Review a few years ago and used it in his new publication instead. It's available here. More about the The Augustine Institute here.