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No Pretty Pictures : A Child of War

No Pretty Pictures : A Child of War

List Price: $17.99
Your Price: $12.59
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fantastic
Review: I loved this book even the cover. I hope that people would read this because this book is very touching and gives you a great look at what happened to children during WWII and how it is sooo hard to surivive. Anita does a great job of showing and explaining her difficult time. This book was very touching and I would recammend this to anyone!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I Loved It
Review: I loved this book. I really was surpised when in the beginning some people throw fecces on their faces. I recommend this book to any one.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: This is a GREAT book!
Review: I read "No Pretty Pictures". It is written by Anita Lobel. It is a story about a girl who is hiding from the Nazis. She is with only her Christian nanny and her brother, who must dress like a girl. It is about her trying to survive the Holocaust. One of the good things about this book is that it's written in diary form so it is easy to read. I thought it was a very well-written book. If you would like to see the Holocaust through a young Jewish girl's eyes, I would highly recommend this book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: This is a GREAT book!
Review: I read "No Pretty Pictures". It is written by Anita Lobel. It is a story about a girl who is hiding from the Nazis. She is with only her Christian nanny and her brother, who must dress like a girl. It is about her trying to survive the Holocaust. One of the good things about this book is that it's written in diary form so it is easy to read. I thought it was a very well-written book. If you would like to see the Holocaust through a young Jewish girl's eyes, I would highly recommend this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: More than a children's book
Review: Mesmerizing and haunting, riveting and very moving. As others have noted, this book pulls no punches. It is graphic, and what it describes is not pretty. But she writes with such vivid clarity that you are right there, experiencing her terrifying, disintegrating world through a child's eyes, ears, and nose. Lobel's writing is deceptively simple -- with her direct style she pulls you into the confusion and conflict of her world and her own feelings and fears. You feel what she felt -- terror of the German language, love for Sweden, the blessing of getting lost in her first act of creation, ambivalence about being Jewish.

Though the subject matter is tough, this is an appropriate book for children over the age of ten if it is accompanied with discussion and information about the context of the war and Nazism. Because Lobel is writing through a child's eyes, the material is presented in a way that mature children would probably be able to relate to and handle well.

I found this book hard to put down, and when I wasn't reading it, I spent much of the day thinking about it. I am 44, mother to a three year old and a six year old, and more than once while reading this book I would go in to their room and look at my sleeping children and imagine what it would be like for them, and what it was like for little Hanusia (Anita Lobel's childhood name) to be suddenly torn away from all they'd ever known and threatened with death on a daily basis for more than five years as they moved from hiding place to hiding place. And I would count my blessings.

This book is unforgettable, and highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Holocaust Horrors Remembered
Review: Most Holocausts books touch you because they deal with the things you learn in schools: Auchwitz, Plazow, the gas chambers...but NO PRETTY PICTURES: A CHILD OF WAR by Anita Lobel is different. It tells about the way young Hanka's father ran to Europe when she was barely six, how the raids affected her wealthy Polish family-and how she was smuggled away with her Nanny-affectionatly called Niania- and taught the Cathloc ways. Anita loses her Jewish Pride, and a great part of her childhood. From age 5 to age 12 she is seperated from her parents, then from her nanny when a convent they hid in was loaded into cattle cars. Though she was young, the pictures painted are vivid. Her brother is dresses as a girl. Her life is torn apart as she and her brother hide within themselves as their nanny's "little girls." Anita Lobel addresses the horrors of hiding from the Nazis with the blunt honesty that leaves you forever remembering young children on the run.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Special Thanks
Review: My wife is a child of parents who survived the terror of the Holocaust. No Pretty Pictures is the first book that has moved me to tears in many years. It is so startingly real, terrifying at first, but with a joyous conclusion. I urge anyone interested in history, family, and the human heart to read this book. Thank you, Ms. Lobel, for moving me so.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: No Pretty Pictures
Review: No Pretty Pictures is one of the best books I've read. It is captivating. It tells the story of a young girl and her little brother trying to make it through the halocaust. Their father left to find work and there mother left them with there Nana. After numerous hiding spots, they are caught and sent to a prison. From there they go to Plazow to Auchwitz. The last third of the book they are in a center for children with tuberculosis. Later, Anita (the girl and author) waits in a camp for orphans while her brother recovers. It ends right before there whole family goes to America.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I give No Pretty Pictures an A-
Review: No Pretty Pictures is probably by far the best book I have ever read. It is filled with true life tragedies and it gave me such a feeling where I was happy to be alive at this day in time and in such a place as America. About 50 years ago, it was a horrible time where in which Anita Lobel was at the wrong place at the wrong time! Her autobiography uses such imagery and imaginative language, it's as if i were in that period of time walking side by side with her! At times it came to a point where she used too much detail to describe certain aspects of her life as a young Jewish and Polish girl. I feel this book should be read by someone who wants to learn a bit about history, someone is lost in their own lives or someone who just wants to read a good book and shed a tear or two. The reason I mostly enjoyed this book so much was because I come from Poland and it gave me a sense of what my people including my grandparetns and other relatives went through!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: No Pretty Pictures, A child At War By Cassandra
Review: Summary:
In 1939, when Anita Lobel was five, German soldiers marched into Krakow. Anita's father, the owner of a chocolate factory and a Jew, runs away in the middle of the night. As a child, Anita Lobel spent years hiding from the Nazis and trying to protect her little brother. The two children have to work through assumed identities, a dangerous stay in the Krakow ghetto, hiding in a convent, and much more! They were captured and marched from camp to camp. Finally, in 1945, they were reunited with their parents and they had to learn to live all over again.

My thoughts:
This book touches your heart in a way few books do. Told from a child's point of view, using a very child-like voice, the story leaps out of the pages and into your mind. This book is written by an illustrator of beautiful picture books like Potatoes, Potatoes, and On Market Street. The title, No Pretty Pictures, seems to reflect her drawing career. In one example, when she first was allowed to enter school after the war, she was sent to an art class. There, she was given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and a set of new watercolors. She painted a wonderful blue chair, to the delight of her art teacher and the other students. She hasn't stopped painting since.

One moral that simply explodes out of this book is to never give up. No matter what life throws at you - starvation, imprisonment, hiding, or whatever - you can persevere. Anita overcame all of the obstacles placed in front of her, either by herself or with the help of others, and has created a spectacular life for herself. If she can succeed despite such odds, so can everybody else.

I think children would love to read this book when they are old enough to get all the way through it. At almost 200 pages, it is not a quick book to read. But it is a gripping, page-turning story - one of those kind that you can't put down. I think children will be drawn to the child-like voice of the story, the innocence the author manages to use. Anita Lobel is one of those truly gifted authors that can tell a horrible story about a child, for a child, without sounding condescending or self-pitying.


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