book data
595 ratings,
4.15
average rating, 198 reviews
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published
September 19th 2006
by HarperCollins
binding
Hardcover, 512 pages
literary awards
National Book Critics Circle Award (2006)
isbn
0060542977
(isbn13: 9780060542979)
description
Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost is the deeply personal account of a search for one family among his larger family, the one barely spoken of, only to say ...more
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avg 4.15
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
Read in October, 2007
My cousin, who I have never been close to, lent me The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
on her recent visit to France. At the time, she had no idea how interested in this book I would be.
The memoir recounts Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for information about the lives and deaths of his great uncle and his family. His journey starts with only one sure fact: his Uncle Shmiel and family were killed during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (now Ukraine).
As a Ukraine...more
on her recent visit to France. At the time, she had no idea how interested in this book I would be.
The memoir recounts Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for information about the lives and deaths of his great uncle and his family. His journey starts with only one sure fact: his Uncle Shmiel and family were killed during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (now Ukraine).
As a Ukraine...more
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Read in January, 2008
So, I just officially finished my book, The Lost, yesterday (big cheers for me!) and thought I’d let you know what I thought about it...I will start with what I didn’t like. It was long (500 pages – a lot for me at this point in my life!) and as I mentioned earlier a little slow at the beginning. There was a lot of detailed discussion on various stories of the Torah which was interesting at first but by the last 50 pages I had begun skipping over to go straight to the actual storyline. Ove...more
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Read in August, 2008
This is listed as being a “New York Times Bestseller.” One would think that I should have had my fill of Holocaust stories, but apparently not, as this one jumped into my hand at Borders even though I hadn’t known of its existence. It’s not an easy read. Mendelsohn never used one comma in a sentence were he could insert three or four. I was often lost in sentences wandering through parenthetical phrase after parenthetical phrase until I had to back up and take them out in turn in ord...more
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Read in February, 2007
A friend of mine gave me her copy of this book, telling me I should read it because of the intimacy my own life has had in recent years to the Holocaust. My boyfriend's grandparents were both Holocaust survivors who emigrated to the US after the war.
The book focuses on one man's search to find out more about 'the lost,' six members of his family (an aunt, uncle, and four cousins) who perished in the war, but no one knows exactly how. He travels to multiple countries over several yea...more
The book focuses on one man's search to find out more about 'the lost,' six members of his family (an aunt, uncle, and four cousins) who perished in the war, but no one knows exactly how. He travels to multiple countries over several yea...more
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Read in November, 2006
The best thing I read last year. It took me many months to finish this book as I would get overwhelmed by the detail, but I always felt compelled to pick it back up after a breather and continue. This book made the holocaust real for me in a way nothing else, including the Washington D.C museum, has. Brilliant the way Mendelhsson addresses the vast scale of the holocaust while at the same time narrowing it down to individual people who are not heroes or villians, but a regular family like any...more
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Read in May, 2008
A beautifully written, evocative book. Dense, full of tangents, and telling the story of several generations across several continents.
Mendelsohn is the self-appointed family historian who, after an entire childhood of listening to his grandfather's stories, decides to find out what happened to the family members who were left out - his grandfather's brother, his wife, and their four daughters, who were "killed by the Nazis". With little more to go on (when he begins his ...more
Mendelsohn is the self-appointed family historian who, after an entire childhood of listening to his grandfather's stories, decides to find out what happened to the family members who were left out - his grandfather's brother, his wife, and their four daughters, who were "killed by the Nazis". With little more to go on (when he begins his ...more
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half this book's wonderful - Mendelsohn's a Classics scholar at Princeton who loves myth, epics, sagas. He became obsessed with his great-uncle's family, all of whom were killed in the holocaust, and spent several years (and several thousand dollars in airplane tickets) getting at the truth of what happened to them. in between the story of his search he pauses to reflect on jewish theology, greek mythology, and the great and foundational symbols of his religion. these are the best parts - the mo...more
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Read in November, 2007
Wow, what a moving read. This book totally reminded me of my own family history, and my own desire to re-connect with and reconstruct a world that has been almost completely lost with the generation of people who lived through the Holocaust. But this is not just another book about the Holocaust -- it's a book about the nature of memory and storytelling, about how our history determines who we are in the present and who we will become in the future. Nevertheless, I can imagine that this is not ne...more
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Read in March, 2008
I enjoyed this book. Not so much in that it was a pleasure to read (it was slow, long winded and all around a little tough to finish), but more because it really made me question our past and the accuracy of those stories we've heard and held as true. I did not read this book for the Holocaust aspect - I think the underlying message is universal.
Mendelsohn was a little obsessive about trying to find information, but his story made me remember how easy it is to forget an entire life ...more
Mendelsohn was a little obsessive about trying to find information, but his story made me remember how easy it is to forget an entire life ...more
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recommends it for:
Non-Squeamish History Buffs
If you need to get a hold of me sometime in the next week, I'll be holed up in my room, trying to recover from the mini-depression caused by this book. Which is not to say the book is bad - quite the contrary - it's an interesting, enveloping story of one man's struggle to uncover the fate of his extended family; an uncle, aunt and four cousins all killed during the Holocaust.
This isn't one of those "miracles happen, even in the toughest of times" memoirs though...it's h...more
This isn't one of those "miracles happen, even in the toughest of times" memoirs though...it's h...more
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Read in August, 2007
recommends it for:
everybody
This books takes patience and is not a quick read, but it is well worth the effort. The author makes fascinating use of the Torah to help us understand his journey into his family's past. It is a book that leaves you exhausted-- this wasn't easy to write, and I have great respect for that. The title suggests that it's about searching for the fate of 6 specific Holocaust victims, but it's about so much more than that-- memory, human nature, knowing and history, surviving after Surviving, family, ...more
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02/05/09
Bookmarks Magazine
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Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning book critic and author of The Elusive Embrace, tells a magnificent, heartbreaking story that toggles between past and present. Masterfully and lovingly narrated, his story extends Holocaust remembrance past the tragedy itself to rescue from oblivion the vanished world of prewar Poland. Despite the utterly compelling nature of this family history (Mendelsohn's own life included), The Lost is not an easy read. First, there's the difficult subject matter. Second,
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Read in June, 2009
A young boy who becomes a man persists in his quest for knowledge as to what exactly happened to six Jewish members of his family, (out of the six million holocaust victims during World War II). He travels the world to talk to any person who knew of or personally knew those six members. Through pictures, letters, and “oral history” at its best, Daniel Mendelsohn learns as much as he can about his six family members – what they were like, who their friends were, why they stayed in Europe...more
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Read in April, 2007
This is a mesmerizing and powerful book, certainly one of the best books I've read in quite a long time.
The Lost tells the true story of the author's search to discover what happened to his great-uncle's family in WWII. His relatives can say only that Schmiel, his wife Ester and their four daughters were killed by the Nazis in their small Polish town. Daniel Mendelsohn becomes obsessed with knowing more than that; he needs to have a deeper knowledge of how and when these family membe...more
The Lost tells the true story of the author's search to discover what happened to his great-uncle's family in WWII. His relatives can say only that Schmiel, his wife Ester and their four daughters were killed by the Nazis in their small Polish town. Daniel Mendelsohn becomes obsessed with knowing more than that; he needs to have a deeper knowledge of how and when these family membe...more
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Read in January, 2007
A good, important, moving book about a man's search for lost relatives and the impact the search has on his family--but I struggled with this book like crazy, fighting the urge to pull out my red pen. The man has a lot to say, but desperately needs an editor. I spent so much time slogging through the sloppy writing that it interfered with the content. I am glad I read it and it was worth the trouble, but I'm sure the story could have been told more nimbly.
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I was amazed by the concept of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, his elderly relatives would weep over his resemblance to his great-uncle Schmiel. The great-uncle, his wife and their four daughters were all killed by the Nazis. Almost sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, Mendelsohn travels the globe, searching for answers about Schmiel and his family. It’s both a resurrection of the past and a race against time, because many of the people he sp...more
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Read in July, 2008
This book is sad and beautiful and riveting. The story itself isn't unusual since the fate of this family was the fate of many European Jews in the Holocaust. But the author pursues the story with such loving care, and the uncovering of what happened is handled almost unbearably well. I also enjoyed how the author wove in philology/etymology and biblical reference. I loved it. I cried all over it. I forced it on my mother.
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I really liked this book. I nearly quit reading after 50 pages due the run on sentences and excessive use of punctuation. Some sentences are more than half a page in length and I found them difficult to read. Commas, dashes and parentheses are liberally used. I kept reading though because the premise had caught my interest.
Mendolsohn wrote the book after searching for his relatives killed during the holocaust. Because all of his family that stayed in Poland during WW2 were killed, h...more
Mendolsohn wrote the book after searching for his relatives killed during the holocaust. Because all of his family that stayed in Poland during WW2 were killed, h...more
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Read in January, 2009
This book is interesting (I have great interest in the crimes of the Holocaust) but tedious. Has anyone read it?
Okay, I wrote that while trudging through the first few chapters. After finishing "The Lost" I have to say that this was one of the most moving reads I've had in quite awhile. As I began Mendelsohn's work, I was thrown off by his style - what seemed to be run-on sentences and intricate details that I deemed useless and tedious. However, as I went on I realized...more
Okay, I wrote that while trudging through the first few chapters. After finishing "The Lost" I have to say that this was one of the most moving reads I've had in quite awhile. As I began Mendelsohn's work, I was thrown off by his style - what seemed to be run-on sentences and intricate details that I deemed useless and tedious. However, as I went on I realized...more
Read in December, 2008
This book describes Daniel Mendelsohn's search for the six members of his family (his great uncle) who were lost during the Holocaust in World War II. The actual story is fascinating but the author's sentence structures are very complex and he uses commentaries from the book of Genesis to add themes to his search. As much as I know and love the book of Genesis, I found this part tedious and wanted to skim it every time.
On a positive note, we all need to remember what happened to Je...more
On a positive note, we all need to remember what happened to Je...more
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quotes from this book
"To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead."
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