Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 6^-12. For the millions who know The Diary of Anne Frank, this direct, highly readable commentary, first published in Germany, adds crucial background about the Nazi occupation of Holland and the personal lives of Anne, her family, and the other four refugees who hid in the cramped secret annex for two years. It also adds information about their five rescuers--who they were, what they did, why they risked their lives. In addition, this is also a history of the Diary's publication in all its various versions, from the first, in 1947, published by Anne's father, Otto Frank, to the much fuller, definitive version, edited by Pressler in German in 1992 and translated into English in 1995. Pressler's commentary is authoritative, honest, and thoughtful. Careful not to idealize her subject, she shows that Anne was a complex, gifted teenager who was resentful of her mother, jealous of her sister, and desperate to fall in love, even if it meant inventing the image of her boyfriend. Pressler also discusses how Otto Frank censored his daughter's diary for publication; how he cut Anne's intimate descriptions of her sexuality and her sometimes angry remarks about her mother and the others in hiding. One important issue Pressler doesn't get into, however, is the ongoing controversy about why Otto Frank censored Anne's interest in her Jewishness. There are frequent short quotes from the definitive edition, and Pressler also draws on many well-documented sources, especially Miep Gies' Anne Frank Remembered (1987) and Willy Lindwer's The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank (1992). The eyewitness accounts of a "broken" Anne before her death in Bergen-Belsen deny forever the upbeat message some have tried to patch onto her story. --Hazel Rochman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
(Young Adult) In a 1997 New Yorker article, Cynthia Ozick asked the reproachful question ""Who owns Anne Frank?"" Over the years Anne's extraordinary diaries (she wrote two versions-one original, one revised) have been expurgated and romanticized on stage and screen, as well as in the minds of readers who, rightly or wrongly, draw inspiration from her story. Now Mirjam Pressler, the German editor of The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, which puts back passages Otto Frank omitted from his daughter's work before its initial publication, redirects focus to the only Anne anyone today can possibly know: Anne the writer. Pressler's sincere, levelheaded, and unabashedly personal text relies closely on Anne's own words as it examines her too-short life and the circumstances under which it was snuffed out. At the same time, it puts into perspective Anne's often-harsh evaluations of the seven other people in hiding with her. We know Anne, in her two-year confinement, developed into an amazingly gifted writer, but she was also a teenager. It was only natural for her, especially given the unremittingly close contact she had with the others in the ""Secret Annex,"" to fight with her mother, envy her sister, and make cutting remarks about the middle-aged male dentist with whom she shared her room. Pressler sympathizes with Otto Frank's inclination to delete Anne's harsher comments from the published diary out of respect for the dead, but doesn't agree with his decision. The Anne whom Pressler shows us, drawing on ""accounts by people who knew her or followed her trail"" in addition to her own extensive study of the diaries, is not a saint or an untouchable genius, but a complex person with faults and strengths like anyone else. She was special, but she was also one of millions who perished. ""How impersonal that word 'millions' sounds!"" laments Pressler. ""It conceals the fact-only too easily and perhaps too readily forgotten when round figures of victims are listed-that the murdered people were all individuals with their own lives to lead."" With balance and poignancy, Anne Frank: A Hidden Life succeeds in conveying both the individuality of the most famous Holocaust victim and the enormity of the tragedy that consumed her. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
