Rating: 
Summary: good book but a little morbid
Review: I very much enjoyed this book. I am a high school freshman and this book was more or less referred to me from my english teacher. The book tells a story of a boy that has to endure tremendous hardships as a gypsy. Parts of the book are quite gruesome and often I had to skim ahead to avoid a particularly disgusting passage. The book is well-written but I do have some qualms about it. I would like to ask, "At what point does a book stop being literature and become a recollection of a person's nightmare?" Does Mr. Kosinski have the ethical right to write a piece that exposes readers to the horrors of war to the point of terror? If it hadn't been for my love of reading, honestly I wouldn't have finished the book. At times I was so throughly disgusted I had to read something else to lighten my mind. Like I said before, the book was very good although the ending is somewhat unclear. I would recommend this book to any experienced reader due to the graphic scenes. I think that you will be glad for reading it although you may not think so right after you finish.
Rating: 
Summary: Of Questionable Historical Value
Review: Although Kosinski did not write this work as history, American readers are liable to accept its claims as gospel truth. It is unfortunate that Kosinski invents events which never happened. For instance, his claim that Jews hiding in swampy areas were attacked by local Poles is flatly contradicted by eyewitnesses, and there are other non-factualities in this text as well. Considering especially the fact that Kosinski owes his very life to Poles who sheltered him from the Germans, it is thus particularly sad that he would write such ugly untruths about the Polish people. The Holocaust was cruel enough without the embellishments which Kosinski depicts in his book.
Rating: 
Summary: In defense of Kozinski
Review: OK, I admit, I should have been older than 14 years old when I first read this novel... it is more graphic than your average WWII book or movie. This novel is an unusual perspective on the holocaust. There are no factories full of jewish labor slaves, no ghettoes, no concentration camps. Instead, there is a small child, seperated from his parents in time of war, lost in the countryside of rural central Europe. In the course of the novel, we discover how the social chaos brought about by WWII plays itself out among common peasants in the countryside as they are reduced to the lowest behaviors imaginable in the absence of peace, stability, clear governance, and a socially agreed-upon sense of right and wrong. And the victim (or victims) is the child who witnesses (and lives with) this state of violence. In response to the review title "More lies about Jerzy", I find it shallow and naive of the reviewer to call this book gratuitous violence invented for entertainment simply because the events depicted are not truly autobiographical. It is a novel. Last time I checked, novelists seem to make stories up on a regular basis. No need to discount the value of the narrative because of its condition as fictional. As for the suggestion that Jerzy did not write this book, I wouldn't be surprised if he had help smoothing his prose into readable English. Kozinski is not a native speaker of English. In fact, he learned the language as an adult. So he needed help with the language... who cares? The plot, characterization, and overall design of the book bear the creative mark that no proof reader or ghost writer could put on a narrative. I don't doubt that this is Jerzy Kozinski telling this story, and the spirit of the narrative, the pain the child feels (he is so traumatized by his experiences that he becomes mute and needs to undergo therapy as an adult to recover his ability to speak) is an expression of WWII as Kozinski experienced it. We don't need to know if Kozinski is the boy in the narrative. The knowledge that Kozinski could identify and describe this violence in a way that actually upsets you and makes you angry is enough for me. Kozinski has written an excellent novel about WWII and its aftermath, which, unlike Schindler's List, doesn't make you feel warm and cozy about how all the good people triumphed in the end... this novel will leave you with the lasting impression that there is no end-of-story resolution/redemption for those affected by war.
Rating:
Summary: Horrifying, excellent, important
Review: I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading this book. I just knew my father was a fan of the author. And, I figured, I was a fan of Andrew Vachss, I'd seen and dealt with some pretty nasty stuff. I could take it. No, I couldn't. "Man's inhumanity to man" doesn't even begin to cover it. Just nowhere close. It's not even because of war, it's because these miserable peasants don't know anything else, can't act like anything more than animals. More than anything else, this book is about just how evil ignorance and intolerance can be. Even worse, the main character, an eight year old child, doesn't have the mental or physical equipment to deal with this enviroment or the complete hell he suffers through. He just doesn't understand. It'll gouge at your heart, the way he tries to deal with the cruelty visited on him for no good reason. This is a powerful book, an important book, and one that shows just how awful life can get in an unjust, uneducated world.
Rating:
Summary: more lies about jerzy
Review: I am a 24-year-old Jewish girl, originally from Eastern Europe, and The Painted Bird gave me nightmares for weeks. The images are powerful, the message is "men are beasts". The graphic descriptions of violence, all too often sexual, are absolutely unforgetable. It gets too much, in ways Marquis de Sade could not dream of. And yet, this book is impossible to put down. Most readers of the Painted Bird treat it as a biography. I am not sure how important this is, but I have been doing some research about it, and about Jerzy, and it sounds like not only was the Painted Bird factually a compilation of other people's experiences, people Jerzy knew, while he apparently had spent the war hiding with his parents, but also that the actual writing was not really, entirely his. He had been confronted not only with having factual inconsistencies, but also with a law suit by the Author's Guild for having hired an assistant professor to help him with the actual writing, and never gave the men credit. The book itself is undoubtedly brilliant, but in my opinion, if it is indeed a work of fiction, the violence takes on a gratuitous aspect. After all, fiction is a form of entertainment, and I personally rather resent being *entertained* on such a base appaling level.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Book
Review: I read this book for my European history class, and I loved every moment of it. The Painted Bird examines the depths of human despair and prejudice. It also shows us how close these elements come to human kindness. It is my sincere hope that everyone at some point in his or her life will take the time to read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great work before the writer became 'americanized'
Review: Potent prose depicting the backwoods of Germany during WWII. Violent scenes, a la CANDIDE, plague these pages and humanity. Full of literary references, this work keeps one on the tips of the toes.
Rating: 
Summary: A Rural Portrait of the Holocaust
Review: In The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski tells of the wanderings of a young boy during World War II. The boy, six years old, becomes the object of brutality and prejudice, all of which stems from a combination of peasant superstition and Nazi hatred. The peasants have no limit to their heartlessness: they beat the boy, molest him, and they nearly succeed in killing him-all for the color of his skin (just like Lekh's painted bird). In their minds the boy is nothing more than an ethnic curse to their village, one who could potentially incite the Germans to slaughter everyone within earshot. Just when the boy senses that the peasants will destroy him, he flees to the next village, and the whole process starts anew. In his wanderings he learns judgment and the ability to discern crescendos of violence. The book is replete with gruesome images: bunkers filled with hungry rats that devour a living body with the efficiency of a school of piranhas; broken Jewish bodies moaning beside the train tracks; a dead woman melting under the heat of her burning shack. Death. The book is replete with it. In the midst of such desolation, the boy longs for stability and friendship and the confidence of trust. But he is disillusioned and betrayed each step of his journey, and the lessons of evil change him in ways he does not know. The Painted Bird has torn me away from my cozy world and has shown me another sphere where people treat human life as though it is not human. The book is certainly gripping and a little disturbing; it has left in me an uncomfortable feeling that I cannot shake. I guess one hallmark of the successful book is its ability to do this.
Rating:
Summary: Warning: Not for the squemish
Review: This truly a brilliant book, no other author that I've ever read was able to capture the art of description like Kosinski. Though it will make you sick to your stomach and callenge you to question man's treatment of man, the things you will gain from the expierence will stay with you for a lifetime. I recomend all teenagers who have every question who they are or why they are here to read this book. Any adults who wander why the world is the way it is or who have never wander before should this book, because after reading it you'll never stop wandering. This book answers many question about the human soul and is a great experiment with the human phsyche. But for as many question it may answer, twice as many will be asked of the reader. It is a piece art the requires input as well as output. You become that little boy, you experienec horror, saddness, pain, loss of faith in God and in you own family. But it will also bring you to turns with mortality and let appreciate the good fortune you most likely expierence. I suggest you read this book and share it with you friends.
Rating:
Summary: a good luck at man's inhumanity to man
Review: This is certainly not a pleasant book to read. Nothing very good happens to our 6 year old narrator as he goes from gypsy village to gypsy village and witnesses one thing more horrible than the next. There are some absolutely horrifyingly graphic, disgusting shows of man's brutality but you almost becomed numbed by reading it. By the time you hit the seen with the invaders at the end who rape and torture the women, it doesn't even seem as bad as half of the other stuff. More importantly, you can see how the boy cannot go back to living with his family now that his childhood is lost. An important book although don't expect any fun here. For my taste, I prefer the gut renching agony of Primo Levi's Holocaust memoirs and novels. At times you forget you are reading about humans since the behavior borders on primate like. I'm not sure mankind has improved that much in the intervening time between the close of WW II and the present. This is kind of like reading a Lord of the Flies with eastern European gypsies and villagers.
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