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David Horowitz wrote the book “Radical Son,” as an autobiography narrating his political and spiritual growth. The author gives the experience of his political journey, which he regards as generational odyssey. The book’s title presents the reader with a chance to imagine what to expect from the book. The title provides a calculatedly designed account of the book’s content. Through the author’s political and religious journey, he has grown to become radical. The journey to where he stands today has been tedious and challenging. The paper presents a review of the book “Radical Son” by David Horowitz. Initially, a summary of the book is provided. Furthermore, the paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the book from a personal approach. The essay culminates by providing the lessons learned from the book. At birth, Horowitz became a “red diaper baby” by virtue of his parents being members of the communist party. As Horowitz grew up, he attended the communist’s school and communist’s summer camp. Horowitz grew up in an environment surrounded by communist`s. The book covers Amer...
The next text analyzed for this study is the first monograph read for the study, therefore, there is a lot of information that had not been previously discussed by the latter authors: Claudia Koonz 's 1987 text Mothers in the Fatherland. The author begins her text with a Preface where she discusses her interview with Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the Women 's Labor Service. While this is not the first time in the study that Scholtz-Klink 's name appears, but Koonz 's discussion of the interview personifies Scholtz-Klink, rather than just make her a two-dimensional character in historical research. For the first time in this study, the reader can understand the reasoning some people (right or wrong) sided with the Nazi Party. The interview
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
In 1844, Karl Marx published the piece “Estranged Labor,” which touched upon four forms of estrangement and alienation of the Capitalist worker including estrangement of man from man, estrangement of man from his humanity, estrangement of man from the product of his labor, and estrangement of man from the act of labor itself. Just under a century later, the “normality and uniqueness of the Holocaust,” as described by Zygmunt Bauman, modeled Marx’s four estrangements. Found in his novel “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi’s Holocaust experiences served as an example of these four estrangements, representing the Lager as a heightened version of capitalist modernity.
Throughout the communist era in Central and Eastern Europe, but especially in the first half of that era, capitalism was seen as immoral and inhumane. Capitalism, as discussed by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, was the cause of many social ills in society and needed to be overthrown (Marx 221-222). In “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” Tadeusz Borowski uses imagery and characters to compare and contrast the Nazi labor camp to capitalism. Although the ideology of capitalism is not as cruel as the Nazi labor camps, when put in practice it does have some similarities to these camps. Of course, Borowski wrote this story while he was a member of the communist party, which suggests that his opinion of capitalism may be skewed. Nevertheless, in the discussion that follows, I will argue that Borowski’s use of imagery in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” was intended to portray the structure, motivations, and social interactions within the camp as similar to those of capitalist society.
In a quest to justify and rationalize his actions, Mochulsky pushed the reader to question the extent of his free will. Ultimately, Mochulsky prompted us to wonder whether he was a perpetrator or a victim. Indeed, Mochulsky’s relationship with the Bolshevik Party was ambiguous. He was a pure product of the Soviet regime being born after the October Revolution and having completed his education under the Soviet rule. He owed the Bolshevik government his upward mobility. Furthermore, he actively participated in the repression apparatus. However, the author blurred the lines between convicts and guards by emphasizing on the lack of leeway of the latter. The camp leadership lived allegedly under the constant threat of being sentenced to the Gulag: “And we looked at the […] ...
In this tiny novel, you will get to walk right into a gruesome nightmare. If only then, it was just a dream. You would witness and feel for yourself of what it is like to go through the unforgettable journey that young Eliezer Wiesel and his father had endured in the greatest concentration camp that shook the history of the entire world. With only one voice, Eliezer Wiesel’s, this novel has been told no better. Elie's voice will have you emotionally torn apart. The story has me questioning my own wonders of how humanity could be mistreated in such great depths and with no help offered.
During the destructive and apprehensive time of the Holocaust, one man accentuated happiness for the children in his orphanage. Janusz Korczak would let the children color on his bald head with crayons, and when the children lost their teeth, he would collect them and use them to build a toy castle. Known as a children’s writer, educator, and hero, Janusz Korczak showed leadership throughout the tragic event known as the Holocaust. Janusz Korczak had an unique early life compared to other children. He always tried to be decorous and positive throughout the Nazi Era. Korczak was memorialized because of his fearlessness. Indeed, Janusz Korczak displayed courage and determination throughout his life.
Bardach, Janusz, and Kathleen Gleeson. Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1998. Print.
“’Is my mother a communist?’ Staring. Straight ahead. ‘They were always asking her things, before I came here.’ … ‘Did the Fuhrer take her away?’ … ‘I knew it.’ The words were thrown at the steps and Liesel could feel the slush of anger stirring hotly in her stomach. ‘I hate the Fuhrer’ she said. ‘I hate him.’” (115)
Soon after World War II the Soviet Union had created a red iron curtain around Eastern Europe, communist regimes could be seen throughout with countries like Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These regimes where severely oppressive and violated basic human rights, hence a growing opposition was beginning to form. From the mid-1970’s Vaclav Havel, a former playwright would become the most prominent Czechoslovakian “dissident” and campaigner against the abuses of the Communist Regime by actively defending the rock group Plastic People of the Universe, being one of the three public spokespeople for Charter 77 and by writing various essays critiquing the communist regime. No essay has had more influence and been instrumental in “dissident” movements in Eastern Europe than the essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Within this essay and others that Havel wrote throughout the 1970s and 80s Havel describes the Communist system, critiques it and explains his strategy for overcoming the regime.
The first reason Americans began fearing the Communist party, is due to the party’s association with Russia and Stalinism. Russia was the most widely known Communist state in the world and the American Communist party’s adoration of it was the best-known thing about them . This became a large problem for the American Communist party when Stalin became a terrifying figure to the average American as knowledge of his atrocities and betrayals began to leak past the Iron Curtain. While most of the American Communists “just didn’t believe” these rumours, the average person did, and they did not see a difference between the American C...
The book “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff is a memoir written about the author’s childhood memories and experiences. The author shows many different characters within the book. Many of them are just minor character that does not affect the author much in his life choices and thoughts throughout his growth. But there are some that acts as the protagonist and some the antagonist. One of them is Dwight, the protagonist’s or Jack’s stepfather. This character seems to be one of the characters that inhibit Jack’s choices and decisions. This character plays a huge role in Jack’s life as it leaves a huge scar in his memory. The author here spends the majority of time in this character in the memoir to show the readers the relationship between Jack and Dwight.
The nonfiction book I read was titled Beautiful Child and was written by Torey Hayden. Beautiful Child follows the life of a special education teacher who is new to a school is met with a challenging class consisting of five children, all with very different needs. The class consists of a child who has tourette’s syndrome (Jesse), a child who we later find out has dyslexia (Billy), two twins who have fetal alcohol syndrome (Shane and Zane), and a young girl who is selectively mute (Venus.) Although through the story we see each child grow and progress, Venus is the main character and we see her open up to Torey through books and most important She-Ra comics. As Venus’ story unfolds, so do the horrendous details of her family that include a past of drug abuse and prostitution. The quietness of Venus that left many confused, begins to make
Mochulsky, Fyodor Vasilevich. Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir Edited and Translated by Deborah Kaple. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.