Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel

Books. Some are hard to put down. Some make you laugh. Some make you cry. And then there are some that make you think very deeply. Night by Elie Wiesel falls into this last category.

Although the first edition of this book was published in September 1960, and Oprah Winfrey selected the book for her book club in January 2006, hubby and I only came to know of this book a week ago by chance.

We were in our room at Resorts World Hotel at Genting, watching Vision Four, an in-house video channel, and it was showing an old documentary of Elie Wiesel giving an acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize for this book.

The book is about the author's experience in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald at the height of Holocaust and toward the end of the Second World War. He was sixteen years old when the US Army finally liberated Buchenwald.

What got me thinking deeply was that in the book, every human value, every moral was destroyed. Would anyone dream of abandoning their parent, whom they had clung to tenaciously  for the past one or three years to avoid being separated suddenly wished that the parent would die so that they would be free to have a better chance at survival? Or would a loving child jump on the father and beat him to death so as to grab that piece of bread crumb from him? Would a child who would retaliate against anyone who so much as laid a finger on his father lie quietly in a bunk above the same father and listened to him being beaten to death by the soldiers for fear of attracting the blows upon himself?

These are not the unfilial, rebellious children. But circumstances, or to be more exact, the horrors of the concentration camps have changed them. The human survival instinct kicked in. It became a "each man for himself, there is no fathers, no brothers here".

I kept asking myself, would I become like one of them, too, if I am in that situation? I don't know, since I haven't been through any suffering. I really hope I can rise above that selfish human instinct to survive, but I sure hope I don't live to experience it to get the answer.

The book was written in an easy-to-read narrative, and if I have a Book Club like Oprah Winfrey, I too would select it for my club and encourage everyone to read it. If nothing else, at least the reader will learn something: When there's a conflict, we must take sides. To remain silent is not being neutral. Being silent is condoning the actions of the oppressor and further victimizing the oppressed. The world was silent, and in being silent, a monster (Hitler) came into being.

Book Review: The Obama Diaries by Laura Ingraham

Is The Obama Diaries fact or fiction?

According to the author, Laura Ingraham, she saw a thick manila envelope lying on the bonnet of her car at the basement parking of Watergate Complex. As she picked it up, a mysterious stranger "hidden in the shadows of a stairwell called out in a deep baritone voice, "Just read it. You'll know what to do." She shouted back, "Who are you? What is this?!" The mystery man stood silent for a few seconds before vanishing...."(page 9)

When she opened the envelope at the W hotel about a hundred yards from the White House (she claimed she didn't drive home as she was afraid to), she discovered that the envelope contained the handwritten diaries of President Barrack Obama, Michelle Obama, her mother Marian Robinson, Vice President Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and others who are involved in the Obama's Presidency campaign.

And so she decided that the rest of America deserves to know what their President, the First Lady, The First Grandmother, the Vice-President and the entire campaign team had written in their diaries. 

My first thought was, wasn't that rather convenient? The busiest people in the world actually has the time to write a diary and they ended up in her hands? I also thought that the part about the mystery man in the shadows booming out to her to read it and that she'd know what to do with it sounds a little bit like a bad script out of a B-grade movie.

Anyway, I decided to continue reading. My conclusion was, those "diaries" were not authentic. Why? Well, besides the suspicions I expressed in the paragraph above, Barrack Obama had worked very hard in the campaign. It just didn't make any sense that he would trivialize his own inauguration. But most of all, it is the language used in the "diaries". The language used was that of a gossip-monger passing on a juicy, slanderous gossip to another. To me, the style of writing was not the type one would use when writing a personal diary. I could be wrong, of course.

Based on the above, I think the diaries were either planted, or Laura Ingraham cooked up the whole thing on her own as a publicity stunt at best, or as a hatred campaign against Obama. 

She certainly came across as very anti non-Americans. She considered being American as an exceptional and special race, and that America had a right to dictate to the rest of the world. But that was just my personal opinion. I'm curious to know what others think. 

Book Review: Under The Dome by Stephen King

I just finished reading this book last night. It was released in the US in November last year, and I only managed to lay my hands on a copy of the e-book last week. 

Under The Dome is definitely one of the better stories written by Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, he has written quite a few can't-put-it-down books, and I am a die-hard fan of his. But this book is really something else. It's not King's usual scare-you-shitless book, although I love to be scared silly.. Rather, it is more like Carrie or Misery, a book on human characters and what they're capable of. If you have read Carrie/Misery or seen the movies, you would know what I mean. 

The story opens on a beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, a small town in Maine, with a population of 1152 when inexplicably, the town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crashed into it, animals are cut into half, cars imploded upon impact, people with electronic devices like pacemaker exploded when they got too near it, while families who went on errands in neighbouring towns are unable to return home.

That said, 90% of the story is not about blood and gore. Instead, it focuses on the town folks, on how they react and change in the face of 'catastrophe'. 

I couldn't stop talking about the book to my hubby. I was sure it would be made into a TV movie, and this morning, the minute I woke up, I troll the net to see if there is any plans to make a movie out of it. And....I wasn't surprised to find that Steven Spielberg has already bought rights to Under The Dome to make it into a mini-series. I can't wait to watch it.

Who Goes To Genting?

What do you do to amuse yourself in the car on an outstation trip, especially if you're not the driver?  Some women I know are very helpful, volunteering their services as co-drivers, telling their husbands to brake, slow down, or go faster before the light changes to red. Some act as eyes for their blind husband, telling them there's a car on the left, stay on the centre of the lane, and so on.

Me, I'm not so helpful. I prefer to entertain myself by doing what I call a random survey of who the travellers are. Or to be more accurate, where the travellers are from. I take note of the registration plates, and categorize them into their respective states, eg., A is from Perak, J is from Johor, and so on.

My latest 'project' was counting the cars on my way out of the car park at Genting today, from Level B5 at First World Hotel (where we parked our car) to the exit of the car park at Level B9. I started doing that as there was a traffic jam inside the car park and I was bored.

So, who goes to Genting? Where are they from? Most of them are from KL, Selangor, Johor, Singapore, with a handful from Penang, Perak, Negeri Sembilan, Pahang, Melaka in that order and two from Kelantan. I was mostly surprised to find that 33% of the cars were from Johor with 8% from Singapore. I would have expected them to go to Resorts World Sentosa or Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, instead of driving 5 hours or so to Genting Highlands. 

Hmmm.....I'd love to find out more about their demographic profile.....yeah, I'm quite nosy.