Well-written, but truly horrible and I hated it. I would give it five stars if I were to be objective and one star for my personal enjoyment, so in the end - three stars. I'm not going to read it ever again. ( )

Just like his lying co-religionist, Elie Weisel "Night", Jerry Kosinski turned out to be a fraud intent on adding his 10 cents to the holocaust myth - 6,000,000 is a wholly unsupported figure - but - real figures for WW2 dead are: 24,000,000++ Russians, 8,800,000 Germans, 20,000,000++- Chinese - Japan 3,100,000, and the USA gave up 420,000 of its boys - in total the war led to 45,000,000 dead civilians, 15,000,000 dead soldiers, and 25,000,000 battle wounded - that totals an astonishing 85,000,000 dead and wounded but all we ever hear about (endlessly) are the so-called 6,000,000. ( )

Not for the faint of heart. ( )

Recommended

I really can’t decide if I thought this was good or not, although it’s certainly not hard to see why it made an impact when it was published in 1965.
On the plus side it’s vivid, compelling and readable. Negatives are that it’s one of those books that feels like it thinks it’s really important. I’m not sure it is, especially given the fact that having originally claimed it was autobiographical, author Jerzy Kosinski later admitted he largely made it up.
For Kozinski’s sake I’m glad, because the book is really fucking horrible. It tells the story of a young boy making his way across war torn Europe in the 1940s and it doesn’t pull a single punch. That mix of self-importance, rambling episodic plot and extreme violence makes it feel a bit like Paulo Coehlo’s ‘The Alchemist’ with added eye gouging. ( )