REVENGE of the TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, and the RISE of SOCIAL ENGINEERING (audiobook) by Malcom Gladwell

Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company.
Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell.
Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting.

I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more.

It was all so interesting and he does tie it all together. Also, we learn about unintended consequences in the last half hour.

This is my 8th review of a Gladwell book and I rated them all as 4 or 5 star books. I always think hard about listening to a new one because I know I am about to be immersed into a complicated, riveting set of stories and that's a commitment.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: REVENGE of the TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, and the RISE of SOCIAL ENGINEERING by Malcolm Gladwell.

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

 

Published in 2015 by
Now What Media, LLC

Synopsis:

Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps.

As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother.

Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew. Legend has it that Loew was much more than a prolific author, philosopher and academic - he was also the creator of a golem. 

Loew was supposed to have studied so much that he worked out how to create a man in clay and bring it to life. This creature is not truly a man and could not speak for itself because only God can do that. But, it is alive and follows the orders of the one who created it. Medieval legend said that if things got bad enough for the Jews, a golem could be created to defend them.

Yakov is led by the voice to a hidden room in the house and discovers everything one would need to create a golem - and if there were ever a time that the Jewish people could used a golem to defend them, this was it...

My review:

I think this book was well done. The art is moody, as it should be when discussing the dark and dangerous days of the Holocaust. I was curious to see if the book would fall into the temptation of straying into the complete fantasy of having the golem wreak havoc on the Nazis to the point of being able to march to Berlin and take out Adolph Hitler himself (Rest assured, this does not happen.)

There is a very clever angle taken by the author. The idea of a Golem is partially explained by texts found by Yakov and his memory of children's tales. But it is also explained through the Nazi officer who is hunting Yakov. That officer takes the legends seriously even though he hates the Jewish people. He wants to use the knowledge to create Golems to create an army that the Nazis can control. There is a "debate" of sorts between this officer and a spirit (is is Loew or is it God? I think it is God.) that fills in a lot of details.

I rate this graphic novel 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Golem's Voice by David G. Klein.

See a good sample of the book on the publisher's site here.

ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: THE GRAPHIC ADAPTATION (graphic novel) by Anne Frank (author), Ari Folman, and David Polonsky (illustrator)

 

Originally published as a book in 1947.
Graphic novel e-book edition published in 2018 by Pantheon.

Adapted into a graphic novel by Ari Folman.

The Diary of Anne Frank is certainly one of the most famous pieces of literature published in the last 100 years. The book the true diary of a young teen Jewish girl that was written as her family lived in a hidden apartment with two other families in an attempt to hide from the Nazi genocide. Before the war ended someone betrayed the families and Anne and almost everyone else in the apartment died in concentration camps shortly before the Nazi surrender.

A page where Anne compares herself
unfavorably to her sister.

Ari Folman adapted the diary into a graphic novel. In the afterword he notes that this was harder than one might expect. This graphic novel is 160 pages, but if he had simply illustrated the entire text of the diary it would have ended up being more than 3,000 pages! The challenge was to maintain the spirit of the print book while editing it down.

I think the book is beautifully illustrated. The moods, emotions, and simple displays of teen attitude come through loud and clear - and make her come to life.

The graphic novel is excellent, which is why it is too bad that it is on a lot of banned book lists. In Florida, Moms for Liberty asked for the book to be banned because of two scenes described like this by Katie Couric in an article: it features two “sexually explicit” scenes. In the first, Frank walks along a series of nude statues, and in another, she asks a friend if they want to show each other their breasts." The Moms argue that the book does not accurately teach about the Holocaust because of these pages - as if Nazi hatred were only aimed at Jews.

Anne Frank's diary has always been edited to make the story flow better, but it also was edited to take out some embarrassing details about the family. Those edits included Anne Frank's passing thoughts about possibly being interested in women as well as men. In the 1950s this might have been a deal breaker with potential publishers so it was left out. This is ironic considering that gays and lesbians were sent to the camps by the Nazis with just as much enthusiasm as Jews - but, that was the politics of the day.

It turns out that it also the politics of now. A teacher in Texas was fired because those pages were read aloud in her class. 

It must be noted that even if Anne Frank were not Jewish, she would have been sent to the camps for being bisexual.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: THE GRAPHIC ADAPTATION (graphic novel) by Anne Frank (author), Ari Folman, and David Polonsky (illustrator).

HOLOCAUST: THE EVENTS and THEIR IMPACT on REAL PEOPLE by Angela Gluck Wood

Published in 2015 by DK Publishing. Originally published in 2008. 

DK Publishing consistently publishes strong "coffee table" type books. Holocaust: The Events and Their Impact on Real People covers a more serious topic than most of their books, but it is immensely readable and compelling.

The text tells the basic history of how the Nazi party took control of Germany, started to implement their anti-Semitic agenda and eventually invaded their neighbors to start World War II. It also tells the story of a series individual Jewish victims as the timeline unfolds.

The book doesn't just cover the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but goes out of its way to include the other victims as well.

The liberation of Dachau in April of 1945. This picture appears
as a two-page spread in the book. 

The pictures are excellent, the text mostly consists of captions for the pictures or a couple of paragraphs that go with the theme of the page. Considering how disjointed this approach usually is in these sorts of books, this book kept a surprisingly coherent narrative.

There is a foreword by Steven Spielberg of just three paragraphs. It adds little to the book, but it is advertised on the front cover.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HOLOCAUST: THE EVENTS and THEIR IMPACT on REAL PEOPLE by Angela Cluck Wood.

NIGHT (audiobook) by Elie Wiesel. Translation by Marion Wiesel.

Originally published in 1960.
New translation published in 2006.
Read by George Guidall.
Duration: 4 hours, 17 minutes.
Unabridged.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel's famed book Night is a standard, perhaps THE standard, that all Holocaust literature is judged by. Originally, this was written as an immense memoir in Yiddish, but during the process of translating the book to French, it was pared down to about one-fifth of its original size. The paring down resulted in a more literary work - a work that feels almost fictional because it is so selective as it tells the true story of how Elie Wiesel's childhood, his family, his community and his religious faith was destroyed by the Nazis.

Slave Laborers liberated by U.S. Army soldiers under the command
of General Patton. Photo taken by Private H. Miller.
Wiesel is in the picture. He is on the second row from the floor,
the seventh prisoner from the left (by the post)

The book begins with his little Jewish neighborhood in Romania that had been relatively unaffected by the war. But, as the Germans are retreating from the Soviets, they implement their Final Solution and start liquidating all of the Jewish communities while they still can. The Jews in Wiesel's neighborhood are divided into groups and loaded onto trains over the course of several days.

The trip, in cattle cars, is horrific. The camps are no better, of course. Wiesel and his father are separated from the women in his family at Auschwitz. They never see each other again. Wiesel and his father go from one work detail to another in different camps, slowly retreating away from the Soviet advance. Their only hope is to stay healthy enough to work so that they might be allowed to live until the end of the war...

I read this book because it is read by students in one of the English classes at the high school where I teach. I have never heard a student speak poorly of the book, which is itself a solid endorsement.

The audiobook was read by George Guidall, one of the most experienced audiobook readers of all time. Not only has he won two Audie Awards (the Oscar for audiobook readers), he has also read more than 1,200 audiobooks. Guidall, of course, was quite good in this presentation.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: NIGHT by Elie Wiesel.

1944: FDR and the YEAR THAT CHANGED HISTORY (audiobook) by Jay Winik

A Review of the Audiobook

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio
Read by Arthur Morey
Duration: 21 Hours, 10 minutes
Unabridged

The premise of 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History is that 1944 is the most important year of World War II - the year that the Allies grew certain that they were going to win the war, the year that post-War plans were laid out, the year of the D-Day invasion and more.

This effort by Jay Winik is very readable and was an informative and entertaining listen. There are times when he creates fabulous images in the listener's mind that are worthy of any novelist. His description of the extent of anti-Jewish operations throughout Europe and particularly in Auschwitz and other death camps are so vivid and so striking that I can readily recommend this book as a good place to start for anyone who wants a serious look.

The book focuses on FDR, his personality and how he shaped the war effort and post-War institutions like the United Nations. Winik details Roosevelt's health problems and points out how Roosevelt's health affected his efforts and possibly affected his judgment.

However, there is a problem with the book and that is the title - what he wrote about does not match the title.

Josef Stalin (1878-1953), FDR (1882-1945) and Winston
Churchill (1874-1965) at the Tehran Conference in 1943.

He has written an excellent book, but I don't think that he proved his assertion of the title that 1944 was THE YEAR. The book covers all of FDR's life and spends a lot of time in every year of the war but 1944. The topics he covered were important and he covers them well. A great deal of the book covers the holocaust and FDR's response to the proof that the "final solution" was underway. I have no problem with this as a topic (I already noted this above) but I do have a problem with a book that purports to talk about the importance of 1944 to world history and goes on to literally spend more time talking about Anne Frank than the entire Pacific Theater of World War II. I am not kidding. Don't get me wrong - Anne Frank's story is compelling, but it is not, in and of itself, worthy of more mention than all of the fighting in Korea, China, the Philippines, the attempted invasion of Australia, the use of the atomic bombs, the war atrocities throughout the theater and the millions of soldiers and sailors involved in fighting throughout the theater.

The reader, Arthur Morey, did an excellent job, even going so far as to mimic the voice of FDR when he read quotes from him.

This is a well-written and immensely informative book that is simply mistitled. 

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5 because of the misleading title.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History.

A LITTLE HISTORY of the WORLD (audiobook) by E.H. Gombrich

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2006
Translated by Caroline Mustill and E.H. Gombrich
Narrated by Ralph Cosham
Duration: 9 hours, 14 minutes
Unabridged

As the title states A Little History of the World is a small history of, well, everything. Sort of.

This history was originally written in 1935. The author was an unemployed art historian and was asked to write a history of the world for children for an Austrian publisher. The first edition was written in six weeks and it sold well and has sold consistently ever since. Gombrich retained the rights and after World War II set out to keep it updated and translated it into multiple languages. He was working on translating it into English when he died in 2001 at the age of 92. The work was finished by others and no one is quite sure how exactly he was planning on ending it.

The chapter on early man is quite memorable in that it gives early men and women a lot of credit for figuring out a lot of important things like agriculture, cooking with fire, stone tools and so on. Think about it - it really is quite remarkable.

The history is told in a kid-friendly, patronizing, but not annoying way. It is definitely a Eurocentric history, especially after the Mesopotamian Empires (Sumeria, Babylon, etc.) are discussed.
India is mentioned, but mostly as an introduction to Hinduism and Buddhism. China gets a lot more attention, but not much more. The Americas, including the United States are barely mentioned. The Native American civilizations (Mayas, Aztecs, Incas) are only mentioned in the context of being conquered by the Spanish and being brutalized. Africa may not have been mentioned again after Ancient Egypt.

E.H. Gombrich (1909-2001)

However, keeping in mind this bias, this is a pretty solid history of Europe. The reader, Ralph Cosham, sounds like a welcoming old grandfather who is telling the story of the world as he knows it to the little ones. It is easy to imagine him in a chair on a cold winter's night with the little ones gathered around and the fireplace ablaze. And, in a way, this translation was exactly that - a 92 year old man telling the story of the world the best he could.

I  rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It is a limited history and I would never make this the only history book that I handed to my child (it has some popularity among home-school parents), but it is readable and interesting. A good place to start.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: A Little History of the World.

My Mother's Secret by J.L. Witterick

Published in 2013 by iUniverse

J.L. Witterick's My Mother's Secret is the true tale of Franciszka Halamajowa and her daughter Helena who are  native Poles trying to survive the German occupation of their country. They speak German since Franciszka was married to a German (the father of Helena) but she left him to return to Poland before the war. Helena works in a German factory and is dating the manager, the son of the owner. She and her mother are somehow scraping by even though the war is a daily reality for them and German soldiers have been known to park their vehicles right next to their house and officers have even come over for dinner. Oh, and they are also hiding two Jewish families and a German soldier who refuses to fight, keeping them all fed and unaware of each other.

German soldiers in a Polish village
in 1942 or 1943

Witterick tells this story in a spare writing style that emphasizes the matter-of-fact way that these two ladies took in families that needed help with little discussion. People came to them needing help and they helped them. That's it. 

It is sad that this is remarkable in this world, but it is.

This story reminded me of the famed Levi Coffin who helped between 2,000 and 3,000 slaves escape along the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. I have visited his home in Newport, Indiana and he was always worrying about how to hide the extra food and water that extra mouths consume. I cannot imagine how hard it was to hide this extra consumption (not to mention dealing with the bodily waste) on a daily basis. Levi Coffin said when he was asked why he did what he did: "I thought it was always safe to do right." I am sure these ladies never heard of Levi Coffin or of the Underground Railroad, but they were of that same admirable mindset.

I would recommend this book for grades 5 and above. The reading level is not too high and the horrors of the Holocaust are not listed in gruesome detail so as to bother younger readers.

See the author's website by clicking here.

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.

4I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: My Mother's Secret: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Story

Reviewed on April 3, 2013.

Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II by Penny Colman

Published in 2002 by Crown Publishers (Random House)

This book is aimed at students from grades 5-12, although I found it interesting and learned a lot.

World War II histories abound. Histories of the complete war, various theaters, biographies of units and single officers fill the bookshelves. I have seen books that look at the role of women in the war - the home front, as pilots, intelligence officers and so on. But, I have never seen anything about female war correspondents. I did not even know that there were female war correspondents in World War II - I simply assumed that the sexist attitudes of the day would have not allowed them to work.

Happily, I have been enlightened by Penny Colman and her book Where the Action Was. She tells the story of the war through the eyes of several female war correspondents - sometimes through direct quotes, sometimes through reproductions of the headlines of their articles that are placed throughout like in a scrapbook. The history of the war and the story of these war correspondents was woven together seamlessly and very well done. The pictures are either pictures of the women correspondents or pictures taken by them (or both).

Female correspondents were everywhere - at the taking of the Sudetenland by Germany, scooping the rest of the world on the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, among the refugees fleeing Paris, in Moscow when Germany attacked the USSR, in Europe, on Iwo Jima, there when concentration camps were liberated, in Italy and on and on and on.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Where the Action Was.

Reviewed on April 2, 2012.

The Good Fight: How World War II Was Won by Stephen E. Ambrose

Great book for school age kids

Published in 2001 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Stephen E. Ambrose is perhaps best known as the author of Band of Brothers, the book that inspired the HBO mini-series of the same name. His passion for World War II continues in this book aimed at upper elementary through high school students.

A Kamikaze plane about to hit an American ship
(In the book on page 78)

While there is nothing new in The Good Fight, it is a fantastic introduction to the war. All of the major theaters are covered and, perhaps best of all, there is a full page 10" x 10"  picture from the war that show everything from the home front to kamikaze planes to Hitler in a elaborate Nazi rally to Holocaust victims and even more. Those pictures and the little ones scattered on the other pages make the book much more vivid. There are also plenty of pictures of the young men and women that were involved - pictures that make the war seem more real. Throw in Ambrose's mastery of the details and great writing and this is a must have book for any library or grades 5-12 history classroom.

I rate this book 5 out of 5 stars.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Good Fight : How World War II Was Won.

Reviewed on March 29, 2012.

Hitler Youth: Growing Up In Hitler's Shadow by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

"What can happen to a people whose youth sacrifices everything in order to serve its great ideals?" - Adolph Hitler, October 1932

Published by Listening Library in 2006.
Read by Kathrin Kana.
4 hours, 26 minutes
Unabridged

Susan Campbell  Bartoletti's Hitler Youth demonstrates how the Nazis separated children from the parents, their churches and their senses in an effort to make them loyal to the German state and Adolph Hitler.

Starting with the story of a member of the Hitler Youth who was killed in a bloody street fight with Communist youths, Bartoletti shows the chaos in the streets that enabled Hitler to take over Germany. She also details every step that the Hitler Youth took to monopolize the lives and the attention of its young people in order to completely dominate their lives and their loyalties. The reader is introduced to a number of former members of the Hitler Youth and we are told generalities of how the Hitler Youth operated and the specifics of how these actions affected these young people.

Step by step, the schools, churches and families are infiltrated in order to allow the German state to control these young people through seemingly benign activities such as school, weekend outings, rallies and a sense of belonging to a larger purpose.  Did it work? We hear the disturbing story of a young woman who turned her parents over to the police for being critical of the Fuhrer. Another former member notes: "I was carried away by it all."

As World War II progresses and Germany starts to lose, thousands of Hitler Youth became air raid wardens. Some operated air raid bunkers and others were taught to operate Anti-aircraft guns. Others operated giant searchlights and still more were involved in body recovery efforts after air raids. Later, others were brought directly to the front lines, given rudimentary training and put into the fight. Some were so young that they were not given the cigarette ration given to regular soldiers - instead they were given candy!

This book offers a dramatically different take on the Nazi movement and World War II. Listening to this audiobook gave me a whole new reason to loathe the Fuhrer, the Nazis, and too much concentration of power in the hands of the state. This is a disturbing, difficult and important book.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here:  Hitler Youth

Reviewed on April 9, 2011.

Note: This book was put on a book ban list in Tennessee in 2025. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles. I don't know what it says about a person that wants to ban a book about how the government can brainwash a whole generation of young people into hating certain groups of their fellow countrymen.

No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II by Jeff Shaara

Originally published in 2009.

No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II is the final book in Shaara’s World War II trilogy. It is very similar to the second book, which makes sense since it is a continuation of the same campaign. The Allies continue their quest to push across France and into Germany. Patton looms as a larger and larger character. The part of the noble German soldier, previously played by Rommel is filled by Karl Rudolf Gerd Von Rundstedt, so much so that the reader may not even miss the Rommel character at all.

The battle sequences are stirringly told. The “Battle of the Bulge” is told quite well from the point of view of three of the very few soldiers of the 106th  that made it through the battle without being killed or captured (this was Kurt Vonnegut’s unit, by the way, but he does not appear in the book).

Eisenhower at Ohrdruf

 Shaara spends a lot of time in the book among the inner circle of Hitler’s loyal command, with people like Albert Speer and Martin Bormann. It is an interesting choice to do so, but I would have preferred that he had not done it. It would have been even more interesting to have looked at the common foot soldier that continued to fight after the war was completely lost and seen what their motivations were (perhaps this interest comes from a college class I had more than 20 years ago where we met a man who was just that – a common foot soldier who abandoned the Eastern Front and marched across Austria and Germany to surrender to American troops).


Shaara’s tale of the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp was shocking, visceral and powerful. Very well done.

I would rate this book 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II by Jeff Shaara.

Reviewed on November 6, 2010.

Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman

Fascinating.

Published in 2000 by University of California Press.

The title of Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? pretty much tells it all - it is an academic exploration into the people who deny the Holocaust ever happened and their motivations for making this claim.

Of course, you may be wondering why someone would make a claim like this, despite the film footage of newly-liberated camps, eyewitness testimony from both victims and perpetrators, the population records that show that, indeed, some 6 million Jews did not survive World War II and damning circumstantial evidence from Hitler and members of his inner circle that alludes to a "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem".

Well, the deniers are a motley lot. Some are educated and well-spoken and others are not. Some feel that Germany has become a martyred nation to the cause of eradicating racism. Others are pro-fascist in politics and want to get rid of the taint that Nazi-ism gives to fascism, so they try to exonerate the Nazis.


Auschwitz's infamous "Work sets you free" sign

Others are just plain anti-Semites and sincerely believe the Jews somehow "cooked up" the population figures or even somehow managed to conspire to kill off 6 million of their own people in order to create sympathy for the creation of a Jewish country, namely, modern-day Israel.

It was a fascinating book, a little deep at the beginning and the end with the different theories on how to approach history, but the middle was quite informative. 
 
I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Denying History.
 
Reviewed on February 11, 2005.

Train of Life

Entertaining, Thought-Provoking, Funny, and Sad

Released in 2012.

Train of Life is a World War II Jewish Holocaust comedy, if you can believe it. It is in French w/subtitles and it concerns a little Jewish village that knows the Nazis are coming to deport their village. Everyone is panic-stricken until the village idiot has a brilliant idea - the village should get a train and "deport" themselves all of the way to Palestine. The movie is all about their purchase of a dilapidated old train, its refurbishment into a Nazi-style train and their escape across Europe and the chase by the Nazis.

Along the way, there are all kinds of humorous encounters with Nazis, the French Resistance, Gypsies and Communists. Parts of it are "Keystone cops" and parts of it are "Monty Python-esque".

I will not tell you how it ends, because the ending packs a powerful emotional punch. However, I do wholeheartedly recommend the movie.

I rate this movie 5 stars out of 5.

Reviewed August 7, 2004.

Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II by Norman H. Gershman

Published in 2008 by Syracuse University Press.

Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II by Norman H. Gershman is full of beautiful stories of people helping people in the face of evil.

In Albania, a country directly located across the Adriatic Sea from the "boot" of Italy, nearly two thousand Jews were saved from Nazi persecution in 1943 and 1944. Albania was fairly unique in that it had been majority Muslim for centuries. While Italy occupied Albania, the Jews were relatively safe, but with the withdrawal of Italy in September 1943, the Nazis assumed control of the country until late 1944. Photographer Norman H. Gershman travelled throughout Albania and neighboring Kosovo gathering family stories of the people who risked their lives and property hiding Jews in the surrounding countryside, in barns, in guest homes and, in many cases, taking them in their own households and claiming they were extended family.

The book's title comes from the Albanian for giving one's word of honor: Besa. This was intricately tied in with the Albanian (and Muslim) principles of giving aid to someone in need of help and defending one's guests. Surviving Jews told tales of Muslim Albanians arguing for the honor of helping their Jewish friends, neighbors and, oftentimes, complete strangers from foreign countries.

Gershman's photographs are all black and white and often include momentos that have been passed down in the family such as a table built by a Jewish refugee for his hosts and the wall where one man's father was nearly shot for refusing to tell where anti-German partisans were hiding in the nearby hills. I was most moved by the family that has been holding three elaborate books written in Hebrew since 1944. The Jewish family was afraid they would be damaged during their flight to Palestine so he asked his Albanian hosts to hold them until he got word. The family received word that they had safely reached Palestine, but were prohibited from sending anything by the Communist government of Albania. So, the Albanian father has passed the books on to his son while they await another letter and he is hoping not have to pass them on to his own son.

Besa, indeed.

Moving quotes:

"All Jewish children will sleep with your children, all will eat the same food, all will live as one family." - Prime Minister Frasheri of Albania. (p. 4)

"There is a saying: We would sooner have our son killed than break our Besa." (p. 20)

"Our father wrote that when he had the opportunity and the privilege to shelter so many Jewish families it gave him joy to put into practice his Islamic faith. To be generous is a virtue." (p. 30)

"Why hide a Jew? We just did it. It was the thing to do." (p. 34)

"As Muslims we welcomed them all. We welcomed them with bread, salt, and our hearts." (p. 42)

"My father said that the Germans would have to kill his family before he would let them kill our Jewish guests." (p. 58)

"I did nothing special. All Jews are our brothers." (p. 96)

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5 stars. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II by Norman H. Gershman.

Reviewed on June 15, 2010.