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Book Reviews of The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
The Diary of a Young Girl The Definitive Edition
Author: Anne Frank, Mirjam Pressler (Editor), Otto H. Frank (Editor), Susan Massotty (Translator)
ISBN-13: 9780385480338
ISBN-10: 0385480334
Publication Date: 2/1/1996
Pages: 352
Rating:
  • Currently 4.4/5 Stars.
 59

4.4 stars, based on 59 ratings
Publisher: Anchor
Book Type: Paperback
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

6 Book Reviews submitted by our Members...sorted by voted most helpful

reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on + 14 more book reviews
Ann Frank was a brave young girl and I am so glad that she had the wisdom to record all that her young years went through. A must read for everyone.
nikkilian avatar reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on + 8 more book reviews
a classic that everyone should read at least once!
GeniusJen avatar reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on + 5322 more book reviews
Reviewed by Taylor Rector for TeensReadToo.com

This is the diary of the most courageous fourteen-year-old girl to ever live.

Anne Frank lived during the time of World War II, when you could be killed or put in a concentration camp for being Jewish -- or for not being blue-eyed and blonde. Hitler was ignorant in thinking that those with blue eyes and blonde hair were of the superior race, and anyone else should be killed.

Anne and her family went into hiding in 1942 and managed to hide for over two years.

Was Hitler finally overruled or was the family found by the Gestapo (the police that worked for Hitler)? Read this novel about a normal teenager in hiding to find out.

This is a really good book to read if you want to learn more about World War II, or simply about being courageous and living a life in hiding. Also, not only is this novel about the war but also about how Anne grows up and discovers life and writing.
reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on + 329 more book reviews
This is such a good read. Read it years ago when I was a child and it still makes me so grateful that we live in America and have always had so much freedom. A good read especially now, when so many of us have so much but still are not happy.
reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on + 6 more book reviews
Love the book, very sad, interesting to hear a young girl's experience.
reviewed The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition on
I have a read a lot of first-person account books about the holocaust, but this is not really one of them. I don't really understand why this book gets such high praise. It is not an account of the suffering of the holocaust, it is an account of what it is like to live in hiding and seclusion, in confined space, as a teenager, with people who are often not friendly. Anne Frank does write quite well, for a 14-year-old, but here she was writing her diary, with no expectation that it would be published. As such, I found much of the content to be trivial and tedious. The very fact that she dwells so much on the "relatively" small hardships of living in hiding only demonstrates that this was really her only frame of reference to that point. She and her living partners were usually comfortable, warm, well fed, with access to many forms of diversion and entertainment. This is quite a contrast to those millions that were imprisoned, starved, tortured, and murdered by the Germans. Of course, Anne was a smart and sensitive person, who I'm sure was genuinely concerned about the suffering of her fellow jews, but here she writes almost nothing about the horrors being inflicted on her fellow jews, while she was simply trying to find her teenage identity. After reading many first-person accounts written by survivors of German atrocities, I found Anne's diary to be more than just a little superficial. Of course, again, Anne's final fate was just as sad as any of the others, but this is not a book that finds a place in my permanent libarary. I recommend many holocaust books ahead of this one, such as, "I Have Lived A Thousand Years", "Dry Tears", and "The Cage". If I wanted to help my children understand the reality and meaning of the holocaust, I would present any one of those books - far ahead of this one.