Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pros:
Events from the Holocaust are so much more real and disturbing when you get to know someone who lived it. And that is what this book does. You get to know Anne as a person, with all of her strengths and weaknesses. You feel her fears and frustrations, her petty disagreements and her adolescent highs. When those final entries come, and you sense some maturity coming to her, and with it her growing fear, the events of the times take on new meanings. It was an awful time to be alive, and and this book does an unusually effective job at portraying it.

Cons:
I don't think I needed to read the definitive edition. The entries of a young woman going through puberty were not meant for the public, and even if they were, I didn't gain anything from them. They don't add to the experience or the message of the book, so I can see why they were edited out of the mass-market version.