Rating: 
Summary: THIS WAS A DANG GOOD BOOK
Review: This is the story about Oscar Schindler, a German, who had a factory with Jewish slave workers in Poland during the 2nd World War. Schindler is corrupt, a heavy drinker and loves women. A powerful and provoking book about Holocaust and the Nazism. But Schindler wasn't a Nazi, and most of the Jews, that worked for him, survived Hitler. Over 6 million Jews were killed, mostly in concentration camps, and Schindler stands as a symbol to those who survived because of him. He managed to do justice when no one else seemed to care.This story was set in the early 1900's in Germany when Hitler was still in power and killing off the Jews. The genre of this book I think is historical non-fiction. The author of this book did a good job with dramatic scenes in this book and also the details and such in this book. Schindler's list does a very good job at the descriptions in the book and they did a good job with the problem. The problem was that Schindler was trying to protect his men from Hitler because they were Jewish. I would suggest this book to a audience who like historical novels and people who really love exciting interesting books. This book reminds me of a lot of other books in the over all picture about discrimination and the fight to survive. The book it reminds of the most and that I would recommend if you liked this book is a One Day in the Life of Ivan Densavich. The author in this book used a lot of metaphors and language and synonyms that I really didn't understand, but form what I understood I liked. This book was very tough to read and I recommend reading it over a long period of time and in short intervals each time you read. Schindler's List brought me to the edge of my seat every time I picked it up and it was hard for me to put it down when I started. The only reason that I would is because of lack of understanding but don't let that scare you from reading this book because it is a compelling and great story.
Rating: 
Summary: Thomas Keneally at his best
Review: Schindler's list is a great book written by Thomas Keneally about Oskar Schindler, a 'nazi' member who saved thousands of Jews by having them to work for him and by making a lot of bribes and huge efforts to save as many Jews as possible. This is the best book about Holocaust and yet it can not describe not even 1% what the helpless Jews have been through during the Nazi's cowardish empire of horror. It is impossible to read this book and not feel all the terrors and injustice done to Jews. You simply become one of them.
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Summary: Moving
Review: More than a century after WWII and the Holocaust, almost everyone knows the Nazis as an evil force, and those who know the legend of Oskar Schindler know him to be a larger-than-life, fighting-for-justiec, saver-of-so-many-lives kind of guy. This book helps to chop that image a little more down to size: it portrays Oskar as rather hedonistic, unfaithful to his wife(one girlfriend, an affair with his secretary, the list goes on...). But, being disturbed by his regime's ways, he actually decided to do something about it, namely, set up a haven for Jews, under the disguise of an armaments factory. And it just so happened that he was really rich, so he could pay off all the necessary bribes, and had a lot of connections, or he would have landed in a prison or concentration camp himself long ago. It tells his story from a much more human perspective. Schindler's List also attempts to delve into the psyches of various people in various positions, from the noble people who sacrificed themselves to the civilians who mocked and hated the Jews. It also zeroes in on specific incidents that are not so important in the big scheme of things, but are crucial in the life of an individual. Schindler's list also does a good job of exploring the face of evil, and how "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing"---Edmund Burke
Rating: 
Summary: Schindler's List
Review: Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally, while extraordinarily accurate on the events of World War 2, was not a very captivating story. It's about a man, Oskar Schindler, who starts off as a first class industrialist who recruits Jewish workers to work in his labor camp. Oskar, who had many important contacts in the military and government, was able to supply his Jewish workers with more food, clothing, and better living conditions that any of the camps that had been established for the Jews in World War 2. In other words, if you worked for Schindler, you were in paradise. As the mass murders of the Jews in the concentration camps began, and Schindler's labor camp was moved from Moravia to Brinnlitz, Schindler became obsessed with the welfare of the Jews. He concocted a list of 1000+ Jewish prisoners from concentration camps to go and "work" in his labor camp in Brinnlitz, though they didn't do much working. Finally, after a long, hard battle, the Schindler and imprisoned Jews were liberated.
The plot of the story was itself amazing, but the way it was written wasn't as extraordinary. Thomas Keneally used many German words in his writing that made it hard to understand what he was talking about. Also, at some points of the story, he would be telling them very well but then would stray from the subject. It is very easy to get confused while reading this book. He would sometimes go into far too much detail, making the story too much for what it should have been. The structuring of the sentences was also quite extravagant, sometimes too extravagant to understand. So in conclusion, the book Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally was a very good story, but simply not very well written.
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Summary: Schindler's List
Review: This book is one of the best I have ever read. In the beginning of story it was really uneventful, but near the end it got really interesting. I especially like it when Oskar Schindler goes to jail and meets the army man in there for going awol. The best parts of the story are at the end like when Oskar's heart kept going out of pure stubbornness. I recommend that you read this great book and if you don't read it you will be missing out on a great book to read.
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Summary: History Becomes Mythology
Review: Given the awards lauded upon this biographical novel, the acclaimed film it inspired and the subject matter of the story itself, I had expected SCHINDLER'S LIST to be a compelling portrait of an extraordinary man and the extraordinary times in which he lived. After the first couple chapters, however, it is also a gripping page-turner, and an involving read. Thomas Keneally's intelligent account of the industrialist Oskar Schindler and the 1300 Jews who survived with his help is more than a morality play about one good man surrounded by incomprehensible evil. Despite Keneally's matter-of-fact journalistic style, Oskar Schindler is mythologized in the novel, as he was mythologized by the "Schindlerjuden" themselves. He is compared to King Arthur, Robin Hood, Zeus. His moral complexities and ambiguities are left intact. He is charismatic yet flawed, larger than life yet tragically human. Perhaps it is inevitable that Oskar Schindler would take on such an aura. The Holocaust is a mythical era. The human mind cannot wrap itself around an evil so all-consuming and horrors so staggering, so they are simplified. Hitler and the Nazis become a shorthand for evil men; the Holocaust becomes a shorthand for death -- thrown around as weightily yet lightly as Satan, monsters, and Hell. For one to accomplish what Schindler did would require an equally supernatural force. Even when he is not directly involved, miracles happen: A man with whom he is associated is saved from an execution when not one, but two guns jam. Two women separated from the others on his list and exiled to a camp of certain death somehow find their way back into the group to survive the war. After the German surrender, two German shells hit his factory but cause only one woman superficial wounds. A similar mythologizing happens to Amon Goeth, the dreaded Kommandant of the camp at Cracow and (in Keneally's words) Schindler's "dark brother" -- both physically similar and prone to Schindler's excesses. In the minds of the Schindlerjuden and hence Keneally's account drawn from their testimony, Goeth becomes a god of death, oozing evil and brutality, presiding over their nightmares to this day. To what extent the events in the novel are objective fact and to what extent they are subjective myth is therefore unclear but immaterial. In preserving the life of Oskar Schindler, Keneally has taken to heart the line from the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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Summary: A great book, bound to the movie
Review: A book should be reviewed by itself, but considering the wide resonance the Spielberg's movie has had since its delivery, and that I happened to read the book some years later, it is hard to me to keep it apart, so I am not even trying to. The book is well written, and Keneally turns out a very skilled writer, but the main interest lays of course in the narrated events, and I am a bit puzzled about classifying the book either as fiction or biographical. The most outstanding feature I met is the different kinds of rhetoric used by the writer and by the director: the former strict, descriptive and inquiring, the latter powerful and simplifying. Keneally takes the core event as an axiom, and do not to prove it, while he examines the complex stream of events that have taken place in such a complex situation. He also admits that some events, such as the rescue of women from Auschwitz, have never found a satisfactory explanation, and that he is not able to detect when Oskar Schindler made up is mind in trying to save the Jews, then he tells what happened. A completely different view is provided by Spielberg. Moving first from a rough approximation of the events reported in the book, he reinvents the story, depicting it as the human development and moral growth of Schindler. For example, all along the book Schindler remains an unfaithful husband, whilst in the movie it seems that at the end, when back to Brunnlitz, he makes some kinds of promises to his wife Emilie, and also the ending script refers of a "failure of the wedlock": in the book, it is explicitly written that Schindler left his Emilie. In the book the different natures of Oskar Schindler are always con contemporarily present. In the movie he seems like St. Paul on the road to Damascus; in the book he "is dallying like Zeus". According to Keneally, many other Germans give help to Jews, but none of them is mentioned in the film. In a nut, I would say that Keneally tried to tell Schindler's story, and Spielberg, however giving a likelihood representation of Holocaust, have wrought out a story of his own.
Rating:
Summary: My first intro to Oskar Schindler
Review: I picked this up at my library book sale thinking it was non-fiction. Didn't find out it was fiction until I hit the very last page where it states it won two awards for fiction. Boy was I let down and felt the fool. :o) Whatever, it is worth reading. I never knew about Oskar Schindler and I've been reading books covering W.W.II, the Holocaust etc. for years.
It 's about time Oskar Schindlers' life and accomplishments were highlighted...
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent Novel by a great Australian writer!
Review: I read this book, titled "Schindler's Ark", as it was called BEFORE the movie was ever thought of in 1988. I had never heard of Oscar Schindler. I couldn't put the book down. However, one night when I was reading it, I suddenly flung it across the room in anger after reading a section about "man's inhumanity to man". Even though the movie is very good, it does not even come close to doing justice to the book. True heroes are people such as Oscar Schindler, a man that deserves to be honoured in our hearts and minds forever. Mr Schindler I salute you; Thomas Kennealy you make me proud to be an Australian.
Rating:
Summary: Schindler's List
Review: I gave Schindler's list five sttars because of the great details and extremes Schindler went to. Shindler was a great man he was very great in helping over 1200 jews. he had help after the war but only because he saved jews wich became successful when he didn't. It was a great book to read i think it took four weeks. but it was one of the best i've ever read and i despratly want to see the movie.
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