ENGL 101 003

I love Silverstein’s profoundly playful stuff so much more than “The Giving Tree,” but I like playfulness in general best, because I can take it more seriously.

The boy uses the tree as a plaything, lives off her like a parasite, and then, when she’s a shell of her former self and no longer serves any real purpose, he sits on her — which makes her happy?

(O.K., maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea.)”

Silverstein would have made it funny, if that was what it was meant to be.

Mess with the meter of humor, and it’s immediately obvious something is misrepresented.

“The Giving Tree” as a model for how a woman (or anyone) should be is like saying that same soldier sets an example.

When I read the book again these 30-some years later, my only brief reservation — that it should somehow have been funny, that funny might have saved it from its destiny of weird co-optings — faded.

olocaust, still less its astonishing range and depth. The category now encompasses the densely narrated psychological-historical realism

he generations of firsthand witnesses give way to younger generations,

he Zone is a place to which Jewish “evacuees” are brought by train to be used as forced labor or to be gassed straightaway, their remains deposited in the euphemistically named but foul-smelling Spring Meadow.

Holocaust.

And by reason of that, not all of me will die.”

The effect of the Holocaust isn’t singular but cumulative.

Amis’s new and equally risky Nazi novel,

He sits through Nazi concerts calculating “how long it would take . . . to gas the audience.”

The author’s rage at Holocaust horrors is portioned into scenes and sentences; it does not gather into a powerful swell, to overwhelm or terrify.

And mind you, disposing of the young and the elderly requires other strengths and virtues

Nazi doctor-experimenter is presented in reverse chronological order,

“I use

“I used to be numb; now I’m raw.

Szmul is a kind of saint of Auschwitz, ascetic and selfless. If he is not an altogether convincing character, it’s a nearly impossible task to give a convincing voice to such a person (and such a person very likely existed).

One could argue, just as plausibly, that Hitler and

By Evan Osnos

A compulsive womanizer and a sexual braggart, he is erotically obsessed with the wife of the camp commandant, Paul Doll—the elusive and haughty Hannah, who “conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work.”

while I might have gained in knowledge, I had gained nothing at all in penetra

Nazis apart from less efficient predecessors was their twentieth-century access to the instruments of industrialized warfare and annihilation, and a propaganda machine that excluded all other avenues of information for an essentially captive German population.

Jewish prisoners who assist the Nazis in killing and disposing of their fellow-Jews—“vultures of the crematory”

hat are we to make of all those happys like poppies dense in a simple, flat field? Each happy alters the happy that follows it. The plain language complexes through each repetition, until it’s as insided-out and upsided-down as the language of “Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook,” the one book, worked on for more than 20 years, that Silverstein, the prolific writer who gave us the peppermint gale of most every elementary-school literature syllabus, kept not quite finishing.

For those who need a recap: Boy meets adoring, obliging apple tree and eventually, through a combination of utter impotence and blatant manipulation, makes off with her branches, her trunk and, of course, the literal fruits of her labor.

When the tree suggests to the grown man, who wants a home and family, that he should climb

“The Nazis would have loved it,”

happy” is not unlike the sadness of knowing

Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while studying.

To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions.

In the North the feeling has several times forced itself into words, that Mr. Washington’s counsels of submission overlooked certain elements of true manhood, and that his educational programme was unnecessarily narrow.

The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it.

Discriminating and broad-minded criticism is what the South needs

First, it is the duty of black men to judge the South discriminatingly

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,

Now in the past the American Negro has had instructive experience in the choosing of group leaders, founding thus a peculiar dynasty which in the light of present conditions is worth while studying.

To-day even the attitude of the Southern whites toward the blacks is not, as so many assume, in all cases the same; the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise.

it startled and won the

it silenced if it did not

It would be unjust to Mr. Washington not to acknowledge that in several instances he has opposed movements in the South which were unjust to the Negro; he sent memorials to the Louisiana and Alabama constitutional conventions, he has spoken against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings.