From the Kingdom of Memory
Reminiscences
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this "powerful" (New York Times Book review) collection of personal essays and landmark speeches by "one of the great writers of our generation" (New Republic), Elie Wiesel weaves together reminiscences of his life before the Holocaust, his struggle to find meaning afterward, and the actions he has taken on behalf of others that have defined him as a leading advocate of humanity and have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Here, too, as a tribute to the dead and an exhortation to the living are landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the Klaus Barbie trial, his impassioned plea to President Reagan not to visit a German S.S. cemetery, and the speech he gave in Oslo in acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which he voices his hope that "the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these moving essays and speeches, Wiesel swings between outbursts of eloquence and the quiet, insightful conversations one might share with an old friend. His searing account of a trip to Auschwitz, Treblinka and Birkenau, many years after the war, encapsulates the enormity of the Holocaust. In another essay he castigates ``revisionist'' scholars who would explain away Hitler's crimes by lumping them with Stalin's. Included are his plea to former president Reagan not to visit Bitburg cemetery, his testimony at the trial of Nazi murderer Klaus Barbie and his 1986 Nobel lecture in Oslo, a dark meditation on the fanaticism, racism and political repression rampant in the world. On a more personal note, Wiesel revisits the Transylvanian town where he grew up, poignantly recalling his simple, unquestioning boyhood faith. Other pieces deal with friendship, Jewish rituals, Hitler's perversion of language, and the modern predicament--``knowledge has replaced love, machines have killed imagination.''
