Five books to usher in the New Year & put 2016 behind us

3) NIGHT by Elie Wiesel: This book is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. I read this book overnight gripped by the horror of man’s inhumanity. Although I have been at the concentration camp Auschwitz and the holocaust museum in Jerusalem, I still flinch at the story of horror, wickedness and the length to which man will go to visit pain and death on another. By the way, it’s hard for persons who have started to stop, it’s addictive and such persons are always looking for someone to molest. Killing and meanness is like drug addiction and the high persons get from it is unimaginable. Psychiatrists always say this personality disorder always needs drugs and correction. That’s why soldiers world over have post-traumatic stress disorder difficult to cure. Night is a new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Every man and woman must read this book. Look at the world today. I doubt that the higher power that created it meant it to be this way. Let’s change our parade in 2017.