Becky's Book Reviews: Week in Review: July 13-19

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Week in Review: July 13-19

Hidden Like Anne Frank. Marcel Prins. Peter Henk Steenhuis. Translated by Laura Watkinson. Scholastic. 256 pages. [Source: Review copy]
The Merry Monarch's Wife. (A Queens of England Novel). Jean Plaidy. 1991/2008. Crown. 352 pages. [Source: Bought]
The Railway Children. E. Nesbit. 1906/2011. Penguin. 304 pages. [Source: Bought]
You'll Like It Here (Everybody Does). Ruth White. 2011/2012. Random House. 272 pages. [Source: Review copy]
The Dust Girl (American Fairy #1) Sarah Zettel. Random House. 304 pages. [Source: Review copy]
Mission at Nuremberg. Tim Townsend. 2014. HarperCollins. 400 pages. [Source: Library]
Seeing the Unseen. Randy Alcorn. 2013. Eternal Perspective Ministries. 120 pages. [Source: Bought]
Luminary. Krista McGee. 2014. Thomas Nelson. 311 pages. [Source: Library]
Here Is Our God. Kathleen Buswell Nielson and D.A. Carson, editors. 2014. Crossway. 221 pages. [Source: Review copy]

This week's favorite:

The choice was easy this week, but, not as easy as you might think. I loved both Hidden Like Anne Frank and Mission at Nuremberg. Both books are nonfiction focused on World War II. If you haven't noticed, well, I can't resist reading books about that time period. Hidden Like Anne Frank was a collection of survivor stories. Each chapter was written by a different survivor. Overall, the stories were compelling but dark. I appreciated the honesty.

Mission at Nuremberg is about the Nuremberg trials. This was my first time to read about the Nuremberg trials, and, I found the book fascinating and thought-provoking. Again, I appreciated the honesty. I also appreciated the perspective. One of the main characters is an army chaplain, Henry Gerecke.

Religion was something the Allies were also going to have to contend with, specifically, whether to supply the architects of the Holocaust with a Christian minister to comfort their spirits as they explained to the world the murder of six million Jews. The decision for adding this provision had come late and was possibly more controversial even than putting the Nazis on trial. (135)

It was the victorious Allies who were judging the crimes of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, but it would be a pastor of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod who would try and convince those criminals that it was really God's judgment that they should fear. (8)