Reviews

Gr 9 Up-In The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (Doubleday, 1995), Pressler sought to present Anne as "first and foremost a teenage girl, not a remote and flawless symbol." Here, she continues this quest. Utilizing exhaustive research, eyewitness accounts, and imaginative speculation, the author revisits the hidden world of her subject and voices questions and suppositions about her life. She begins with a heart-wrenching account of the liberation of Otto Frank from Auschwitz, his lonely journey back to Amsterdam, and the deliverance of Anne's writings into his hands. The history and content of the three versions of her diary are carefully explained. The author then turns to the world of the Secret Annex, where Anne's writing reflects not only her development as a young woman caught up in a drama both personal and historical, but also the nature of her relationships to those with whom she was confined. There is a frank and thought-provoking discussion of the adolescent's emotional, spiritual, and sexual development. Finally, the cruel reality of the arrest, deportation, and death is described through chilling firsthand accounts of survivors who knew her. A postscript regarding five previously unpublished pages of the diary is appended. For those readers to whom Anne Frank is more than an icon, more than a diarist, more like a friend, this is a worthwhile book.-Teri Markson, Stephen S. Wise Temple Elementary School, Los Angeles Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

While the tragically short life of Anne Frank has elsewhere been carefully documented and inventively researched, this astonishing biography succeeds in delivering fresh and provocative insights. Editor of the definitive edition of The Diary of a Young Girl and author of the novel Halinka, Pressler brings to her task a scholar's skill for textual analysis and a novelist's empathetic imagination. Pressler begins by inviting readers to imagine Otto Frank upon liberation in Auschwitz: the exercise reminds readers of what is obvious but easily forgotten, that history is a retrospective art, and that Anne Frank's death and the discovery of her diaries were by no means inevitable. From there, Pressler draws on eyewitness accounts as well as Anne Frank's diary to shape a remarkably clear-eyed portrait of the girl, ending with her death in Bergen-Belsen. Rather than highlighting Anne's idealism, the author examines the tensions in her diary, performing a critical reading of Anne's descriptions of herself and the others in hiding, and analyzing how Anne edited and reworked her diary in hopes of postwar publication. Incisive and vigorously imaginative in its interpretations, Pressler's work could serve as a model for how to read a subjective narrative. The writing is also very personal; Pressler freely shares her strong feelings, sympathies and antipathies ("What I do admit to finding rather hard to take is Anne's arrogance in making her demands on life"). Anne and the people surrounding her are clearly real to Pressler; she teases their lives out of the diaries and makes them real for readers. Photos not seen by PW. Ages 11-up. (Feb.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.