There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Overall, the author provides plenty of good stuff for tournament quizzes and Jeopardy questions.īright, readable and accessible for all ages.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Stein includes contributions by important women, including proto-feminist Clarina Nichols, who moved her family to Kansas for the purpose of creating an anti-slavery majority in 1854, and Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, who attempted tirelessly to win statehood for the District of Columbia.

Polk, America’s borders increased greatly, incorporating Texas, the Oregon Territory and everything in between the Rockies and the Pacific, creating a massive befuddlement for lawmakers bright lights such as Sam Houston, Brigham Young and John Sutter would all wield profound influence on the shape of the states affiliated with their names. It is largely due to the zeal (or wealth) of John Hardeman Walker who “put the boot heel on Missouri” in order to keep his land from sinking into Arkansas. “Asking Mason and Dixon to survey a boundary in America,” writes the author, “was… akin to asking Mozart to play at a prom.” Thanks to Ethan Allen (“not a furniture maker”) and his motley posse of Green Mountain Boys, the homesteads making up the future Vermont were saved from rapacious New Yorkers.

The personalities behind the disputes take center stage: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were actually a pair of highly accomplished English surveyors of the Royal Society possibly hired by Benjamin Franklin to establish impartially the disputed 300-mile Pennsylvania-Maryland-Delaware boundary. With 50 states, there are plenty of details about border controversies for this mildly titillating follow-up to screenwriter Stein’s How the States Got Their Shapes (2008), which in turn inspired the History Channel’s eponymous documentary.

A fun sequel offers more recondite tidbits of American history.

How states got their shapes book