Inside Anne Frank's House : AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNEY THROUGH ANNE'S WORLD

Rating:
Summary: The most moving experience you can imagine
Review: This book transports you to Amsterdam to the Anne Frank House which has been a museum since 1960. You take a route through photographs and documents in the same order that viewers who are lucky enough to be able to visit the museum in person. You meet Anne Frank and her family from heart rending pictures beginning with a happy family to a family in hiding to their capture and the post-war lives of those lucky enough to survive.
When I bought this book I expected to see photographs of the House but was unprepared to face their overall and cumulative impact. This book is shattering and essential.
This book although expensive belongs in the home of everone. It still costs less than a trip to Amsterdam.

Rating:
Summary: An Illustrated Journey
Review: I have long been interested in the story of Anne Frank. Over the years I have read many books about her and I continue to reread the diary every year. Recently, this book came to my attention and I gave it a read. There is much about it that impresses.

This book is subtitled An Illustrated Journey Through Anne's World and that seems appropriate. The key attraction of the book are the hundreds of photos that fill its pages, many of which I had never seen before. With its oversize, coffee table book format, and slick pages, it is a beautiful thing to look at. Where the book begins to let the reader down is the text.

Granted, the text is minimal and what there is can be highly informative and descriptive; however, I noticed a number of typos in my edition and many of the pictures were mislabeled (if the label could be found at all). It also seemed like different people were in charge of different sections of the book because there was no consistency to the presentation. I actually liked the structure of the first section of the book, where German history ran in small pictures along the bottom of the pages and the Frank family filled the top. I wish this style would have continued because it was very informative and allowed the reader to make connections but this was dropped rather quickly.

Still, there is a lot to be said for this book. It's cliche that a picture says a thousand words but it is amazing the emotion that is captured in some of these shots, particularly if you know the story behind them.

Rating:
Summary: We Remember, If Only We Would Learn
Review: It's an ordinary house, not spectacular at all. It wouldn't be worth photographing at all except for the extraordinary young lady who lived here and who kept a diary during one of those times when the devil was loose on the earth and good men did nothing to stop him.

But because of this young lady and her extraordinary diary this house is a monument, a church if you will, that commemorates not just this girl but all of those who went with her, and all of those who tried to help them.

The book itself is beautifully done, not only a photographic guide but a history, a memorial in its own right with quotations and photographs of objects displayed in the actual exhibition. ==Let us never forget!

Let us also remember the other holocausts that followed to prove that we didn't learn enough: Rwands, Cambodia, Ethnic Cleansing in former Yugoslavia, and what may happen in Iraq between the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds.