The Neighbor's Son
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by:
ISBN:
0-7414-2777-X
©2005
Price:
$19.95
Book Size:
5.5'' x 8.5''
, 401 pages
Category/Subject:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
When 9 year old German Liesel discovers her family Nazi secret she begins her lifelong search for new identity only to discover that she can’t change who she is.
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Abstract:
What if you awakened one day and realized your parents were part of unspeakable evil? Do you turn away from them and therefore yourself? The unique coming of age story of Liesel and her preoccupation with finding her neighbor’s son is extremely eventful and takes the reader from postwar Germany to England, Africa and the United States. It explores interconnectedness between victim and perpetrator and touches on universal themes of family, forgiveness, guilt and justice. This candid account of a family’s history combined with a flawed protagonist’s sexual history will strike deep emotional responses in a thoughtful reader.
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Customer Reviews
Heart gripping, Chilling!
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11/06/2005
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Reviewer:
Ursula Duba
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Liesel Appel's book is heart gripping, chilling, and almost hard to believe--that decent, caring people like her parents gave in to the most evil forces and thereby denied even to themselves that they were in fact participating in genocidal atrocities. How is it possible to delude oneself so totally? Her father a much revered educator to boot! Hadn't her parents been taught the basics of an ethical civilization: "Thou shall not kill" and "Treat your neighbors as thyself?"
Liesel Appel brilliantly succeeds in her wrenching endeavor to lay bare the loss of her parents'humanity, despite the fact that she was a coveted and much loved child, especially by her Papa, the adored hero of her early childhood. In describing this process of dehumanization of her parents and other adults around her, she is unreservedly forthcoming and unflinchingly honest. Not once does she escape into abstract evasions. Besides, this book shows us the nature of her soul stripped down to its very (sweet and caring)essence and therby she gives witness to her own deep humanity-despite having been raised by deluded, hateful (criminal) nazis who notwithstanding that they thought of themselves as belonging to the "people of poets and thinkers" abandoned their own judgement of what's right and wrong and discarded any notion of empathy for those they considered THE OTHER. In this process, Ms.Appel's parents voluntarily became thugs of the lowest kind. By describing how painful it was for Ms.Appel to see her adoring parents for who they were, I want to express my gratitude for her courage to embrace the truth rather than run away from it.
Besides being an inspiration for us all, I would like to recommend this book to any school library, to any college and university and to anyone who wants to know why the Germans, a highly literate and civilized people, most of them baptized Christians who had been taught the Ten Commandments, lowered themselves into cruel, life-destroying barbarity.
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