When Elie Wiesel emerged from quintuple heart-bypass surgery, still wired to monitors, he immediately started writing a book about the ordeal — "in my head." In French.
When Elie Wiesel emerged from quintuple heart bypass surgery, still wired to monitors, he immediately started writing a book about the ordeal _ "in my head." In French.
The Hudson River extends like the sun from the back of Toni Morrison's house, illuminated and infinite, undimmed by an unseasonably drab spring afternoon.
When Elie Wiesel speaks, people listen. He speaks softly and chooses his words carefully. In 1986, when this survivor of Hitler's death camp at Buchenwald was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he was cited as a "messenger to mankind" whose message has always been one of peace and human dignity.
President Obama waxed eloquent at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington this week, speaking of the men and women commemorated there as "a testament to the endurance and the strength of the human spirit." He told how his great uncle, an American soldier, was stunned by what he saw at the liberation of the death camp at Buchenwald.
Surrounded by the haunting memories of the Holocaust, a solemn President Obama on Monday announced a new crackdown on Iran and Syria and said the world never again must allow hatred to take root into the "madness" of mass atrocities.
President Obama toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Monday and called it a reminder that nations too often do not do enough to prevent atrocities, even as his host challenged him to do more about the killing of civilians in Syria and the threat posed by Iran.
I'm of two minds about "In Darkness," a film about a Polish sewer worker who shelters a group of Jews from the Lvov ghetto during the last days of the Nazi occupation in 1943. Based on a 1991 nonfiction book by Robert Marshall, the film — an Oscar nominee for best foreign film — places its emphasis on a sliver of feel-good anecdote that threatens to diminish the larger history it taps.
Bil Keane, the cartoonist whose "Family Circus" mixed humor with traditional family values, entertaining readers for a half-century, died Tuesday. He was 89.
