author:
PIERRE BERG
w/ BRIAN BROCK

Non-fiction
304 pages
American Management Association

Pierre Berg of Nice, France was seventeen and had aspirations of being a hairdresser and a ladies man, but never imagined that the unspeakable could happen to him. While visiting a friend who owned a shortwave radio the two were captured and sent to Nazi Concentration camps because the Gestapo banned all shortwave radio broadcasting. Pierre and his friend made broadcasts of Laurel and Hardy, which were sent only to neighbors, but the Nazi’s suspected them of making long-range broadcasts. Pierre was sent to Auschwitz and his friend was never heard from again.

Written with the assistance of Brian Brock, the story unfolds with twists and turns, in a style that reads like a novel, but was real nonetheless, and fatal for many of the people portrayed. For instance, Berg’s life is spared thanks to the shaky hand of another prisoner whose job was to administer the camp tattoos. A guard misreads one of the numbers while reporting a serious infraction that Berg committed. The prisoner with the misread number is executed, and Berg attributes this to “outhouse luck.”

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author:
REVA MANN

Non-fiction
368 pages
Dial Press Trade

Children veer from one extreme to another; it’s to be expected. When adults do it, it’s fascinating, troubling—and more than a little annoying.

Perhaps it is for this reason that, try as I might, I never warmed to Reva Mann over the course of her autobiography. The daughter of a progressive yet devout Orthodox rabbi, Mann spent her teens and early adulthood rocketing from the arms of gentile to the closeted life of a seminary in Israel. She abandons her life of rebellion in an episode, which is almost certainly partly invented, where her gentile ex-lover invites her to the Kind David Hotel and she declines to rejoin him for another hedonistic fling. Why do I think it’s partly invented? Because he’s staying in room 613—famously the number of laws to follow in the Torah—of the most famous hotel in Israel; I smell more than a whiff of poetic license here, which, to her discredit, surfaces repeatedly throughout the book.

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author:
NEIL GAIMAN

Fiction
320 pages
HarperCollins

If there’s one thing ‘common pleasure’ Neil Gaiman excels at, it’s pitching a book so that it’s suitable for children but also compelling for adults. The Graveyard Book does this beautifully, as an episodic adventure story telling the tale of a boy who survives the brutal murder of his family only to be brought up by the dead.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as ‘Bod,’ is a likeable everyman; he’s the perfect foil to characters that include ghouls, the ghost of a fractious young witch, a (dead) Romantic poet and the shadowy un-dead guardian of the graveyard, Silas. Silas is the real star of the piece, with Gaiman receiving marriage proposals for this—pardon the pun—deadly serious character. It’s an admirably clever touch embodying the moral core of the story in a character whose nature (hint: he doesn’t go out in the daylight) might be considered inherently evil. Gaiman spends much the book subverting stereotypes, which is always to be applauded in a book that children might read.

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author:
MALLA NUNN

Fiction
388 pages
Atria Books

Never read book jackets. They set up ridiculous and impossible expectations that undermine the voice of the author they seek to elevate.

Take the jacket of A Beautiful Place to Die, the first novel by South African filmmaker Malla Nunn. Some marketing wizard decided to write that Nunn “reads like a brilliant combination of Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene.” Bah! She does not. She reads like herself. And that’s not a bad thing.

Nunn does not approach the crystalline prose, the poetry, the psychological depths (and, perhaps thankfully, the Catholic sensibilities) of Greene. Chandler may be closer but the point is moot.

In A Beautiful Place to Die, Nunn begins what is to be a series of novels around Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. Cooper has been sent from Johannesburg to solve the murder of a white Boer police captain in a rural outpost near the border of Mozambique. Nunn does a good job of confounding expectations about whodunit and keeping the reader guessing. Her story is tightly plotted and its twists and turns are founded in the racial complexities and laws of this particular time and place (South Africa at the dawn of apartheid laws in 1952).

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