In these trying times, this book is a gentle reminder that terrible events have the curious power to make us better (more caring, more open, more alive) people. I was utterly transfixed by Etty's swift transformation from a self-absorbed whiner to a spiritual and philosophical mystic who transcended the horrors of her time.
As a memoir of life and death during the Nazi Holocaust, as well as a chronicle of spiritual transformation, this ranks among the very best.
Though it has been five years since I read the book, I am still inspired by Etty's courage and love.

This book is filled with some of the deepest most meaningful words I have ever read. Etty begins her diaries "struggling for true inner freedom" (p. 55) She achieves this. She turns inward to her faith at a time when thing around her are in total despair. She is a role model for others. In her twenty eight years she reaches a point of spirituality many of us do not. Excellent book. Begining was a little hard to get into but stay with it! Her writing becomes more clear, you can learn a lot from Etty.

I found this book very difficult to get into. Like many spiritual journals this book seemed at first overly self-centered and indulgent; one page read boringly very much like the page that went before. Her sleeping around and her bizarre therapy with Spier put one off. And Etty herself felt very deeply, vehemently, passionately; reading her can be like drinking water from a fire hose. One might feel like giving up the battle, but it will be well worth your while to push on. More and more one begins to see astonishing signs of spiritual growth and maturity and then of extraordinary achievement and grace. Emotionalism passes into selfless and self-sacrificing love. She moves speedily from her first ability to say the word God to constant prayer and even to a mystical union, all the more significant for being so unrelated to any conventional religion. In the midst of ever increasing certitude about coming annihilation, and eventually amid the horrors of the transit camp of Westerbork, this young woman not only manages to preserve her sanity and keep herself from hating her persecutors, but somehow even comes to rejoice in the beauty and meaning of life. It is truly a wonder how anyone could manage to grow to such transcendent greatness of spirit in so short a time. How fortunate for us that it happened to a woman who felt so deeply, knew herself so clearly, and wrote so aptly, and whose writings from the midst of the Holocaust has survived to our time.

I didn't care for this book all that much. First, her adolescent experience as an immigrant to Canada seems heavily covered over by later-acquired learning in the philosphy of structuralism, semiotics, etc, all very fashionable nowdays. The book has more the feel of a post-mortem analysis than a personal memoir, and in trying to be both it fails on both levels.

Second, I didn't find her a sympathetic character, because she herself seemed to have so little sympathy for others: Canadians were boring, dull, undemonstrative; North-American teenage life superficial; the local Jewish community obsessed with status and the notion of 'better' or 'worse' people. etc. I got the feeling of her portraying herself as a true and sensitive (European!) heart among the barbarians and the uncomprehending. Sorry, doesn't wash.

This book is a must. It explores the difficulties of learning to express oneself in a new language. Although I have never experienced this myself, it does make you consider the link between language and experience and how sometimes there are no words available to say what you really feel. Hoffman draws you in to her narrative with ease, despite the difficulties she expresses. It is a moving insight into her life as an immigrant and her fellings of alienation.

For many years, I have been involved in the preparation of teachers, both graduate and undergraduate, to work in the multicultural, multilingual climate of our nation's schools. Teachers can be successful ONLY if they have a real sense of what is going on in the minds of the children they teach. All too often, they make assumptions about what a child knows and is able to do or what a child is actually feeling and why. Such assumptions can wreak havoc in the lives of the thousands of immigrant children who come to our classrooms from their home cultures each day speaking a language other than English. Eva Hoffman's book, more than any other work I know, allows a teacher to learn and FEEL what it is really like to make that ultimate journey from the culture and language of one's birth, of one's heart, into the English-speaking world. This is one of the most brilliant books that I have ever read, and it is a MUST for every teacher!

This book filled me with hope, despair, joy, sorrow and finally, at the end, a disquieting and lingering sadness. Though not always complete in itstelling of political events, I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in learning about his Polish Jewish past. A good first look.

In stark contrast to Marzynski's film Shtetl, and even more so Yaffa Eliach's book, There Was Once a World, Eva Hoffman has a remarkably balanced view of the relationships between Polish Jews and Polish gentiles. She candidly informs the reader how prejudices worked both ways. Polish gentiles might look at Jews as crafty, while Jews would often display a condenscending attitude towards Christians. She also discusses the tensions created by the fact that only some Jews saw their loyalty being to Poland, whereas other Jews shifted their loyalties to whatever foreign power was ruling over Poland at the time. Of course, the Russians, following a divide at emperia policy, encouraged polarization between Polish Jews and Polish gentiles by their policies. And this became worse during WWII. Hoffman acknowledges the fact that many Jews who collaborated with the Soviet Communists against the Poles, and the inevitable anti-Semitic backlash this created. However, Hoffman is careful to point out that, contrary to the impressions created by many Holocaust films, Poles did not (with rare and individual exceptions) participate in the German Nazi-sponsored murder of Jews. In fact, the roundups of Jews in the Bransk ghetto were performed by Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborator police forces, not Poles. And, when it comes to individual instances where Poles did betray hiding Jews to the Germans, Hoffman is also fair enough to the reader to point out the unfortunate fact that Jews also searched for and betrayed other Jews. Finally, she addresses the accusation that the mainstream Polish underground (AK) murdered Jews who hid in the forests. She notes that there were various criminally-oriented bands which roamed the countryside, and it is these, and NOT the AK, which may have been responsible for the murder of fugitive Jews, who, owing to their obvious vulnerability, were a perfect target for such crimes. However, Hoffman is apparently unaware of the fact that, according to a Soviet document, there were also "phony AK" commandos sent inside German-occupied Poland by the Soviet Union. The job of these commandos was to commit various crimes against the civilian population (including Jews) and then to create the impression that the AK was responsible for them, all as part of an overall strategy to discredit anti-Communist forces in the eyes of the population. However, all in all, despite this shortcoming, Hoffman is remarkably objective in her treatment of Polish-Jewish relations. It is sad that her work is the exception, and not the rule, in this regard.

I give this book 5 stars. The author has rejected myths, generalizations, and prejudiced thinking to give a fascinating history of Polish Christians and Polish Jews. She is careful to give the viewpoints of both groups, beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing to the present. When she quotes a source, she reminds us that this is that person's opinion, not necessarily a universal truth. She cites to references in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She does not condemn or defend either group, and realistically argues that neither was right or wrong; some people helped each other, some people harmed each other. She gives a detailed account of the history of Poland that is not widely available in this country. The author is both Polish and Jewish, and grew up in Poland. Her ability to abjectively at her subject is convincing and admirable.

The subject of Eva Hoffman's book, The Secret, is certainly thought provoking. The question of how an individual can cope with the fact of being a clon can be fascinating. The situation of mother and daughter so much alike raises interesting psychological situations.
Ms. Hoffman in her book touches all the right problems, but somehow she leaves it all on the surface, never daring to explore the emotions of the characters in deep.
The book feels more like an account of events in the life of the heroine and it never reaches the level of a great novel.

This book was bought on a whim - picked it up and the blurb sounded interesting. I am a SciFi reader, but this type of story would be enjoyed by any reader of more serious fiction. Unlike the other reviewer, I loved the writing style - written as a flow of conciousness - passionate and moving - yet coherent. The scientific concepts (and issues) are not new, but the investigation of identity, oedipal issues, social discourses and moral questioning seem fresh and personal. It reminds me of Philip K Dick's work, but a bit happier!

I liked her first books

autobiographical 'lost in translation' for being so honest
so sincere,
her factographical 'exit to history' for being well researched,
well documented and having rare indights.

But this new book, 'Secret' I love. This is her first real
novel, science fiction, and I would compare her to Bradbury.

It is about people, not technology, but near future technology
is well extrapolated and credible. I think the reviwer who found her 'too wordy' missed a subtle humor and magic of the
mastery of language and description.

Eva Hoffman, back among her Polish homeland and other former Iron Curtained nations, offers a thoughtful look at the years just after the breakdown of the wall. Not a travelogue so much as an extended series of conversations with usually well-spoken people much like Hoffman herself. Not a book for those seeking Romany flavor, hotel mishaps, and quaint lore. She largely conveys her impressions and ideas in a style reminding me of essays for the New Yorker or the Sunday magazine of her own employer The New York Times.

Her reflections on Havel's Czech Republic, the still lurking oppressiveness of Romania post-Ceausescu, the Bulgarian-Soviet aura, and the Hungarian cynicism mesh nicely with her own Polish rather aristocratic attitudes (not by birth but by predilection?).

While the report's well-written, it does lapse into an over-reliance on the chat in the salon, so to speak, rather than on the street. You feel as if she, naturally attracted to educated dissidents for the most part, wished to relate their stories to us at the expense of a conventional tour of the countries she visits. For instance, little of Slovakia appears, and the sights she describes stick less in the mind than the ideas she ponders.

Fine, but fair warning for anyone expecting another Patrick Leigh Fermor (pre-WWII) or Brian Hall (Stealing from a Deep Place, 1988--Romania/Hungary/Bulgaria cycled through from an American's p-o-v). A useful introduction to how politics inevitably must give way to the ordinary, the human, the lived experience. Although she may differ from Havel, Hoffman provides a beneficial Western counterpart to his own thinking. 3 1/2 stars.

I'm preparing to move to Romania, and read this book to give me an idea of the way things were over there a few years ago. I greatly enjoyed this book. It was well written, and thought-provoking. Every now and then the author would lapse into excessive use of "textbook speech", but for the most part I appreciated the way she wrote. I also appreciated the way she used various stories to get her information across. For someone with little to no interest in this area, this would not be a good book to start with. However, I found it very readable, and highly recommend it.

After studying the politics and history of Eastern Europe extensively as an undergraduate in college, I read this book and found it simply marvelous, for in all the history and political science books yo are given fact upon fact, but until I read this book I didn't know what it was like to actually be there. She vividly portrays the countries of the region from an ordinary person's perspective, the sights, the sounds, the feeling in the air of these countries. It can be read as an introduction to Eastern Europe, the avid student, or even the educated expert. It can also be enjoyable as simply leisure reading.

In the mid-1990s, former Mayor Guiliani forced adult stores to leave communities and "cleaned up" Times Square in favor of the Disney Corporation. This anthology is based upon writings from a conference on the matter. The authors ask many questions. How does/did public sex shape the gay community? How does the attack against public sex hurt AIDS education? How are prostitutes affected by the Times Square "clean up"? Why are radical queers uniting with anti-gay conservatives to close bathhouses? How is the public/private divide collapsing as gay rights becomes old news?

This book showed academics working as sex radicals and sex radicals working as academics. Gay studies undergraduates are going to be surprised at how risque and sex-positive their stodgy professors can be. Readers of all educational backgrounds will be shocked when they see what sexual act is portrayed on the cover of this basically non-pornographic text.

This book had authors diverse in their gender, sexual orientation, and HIV status. This will give readers of all sexualities a glimpse at how members of the gay community can conflict with each other. For instance, the venom at which these contributors condemn Signorile and Rotello has not been seen since the constructionists' attack against the late historian Boswell. Still, as complex as this book was, it may be an example of too many cooks spoiling the soup. Further, this book is VERY New York-centered and many readers from other localities may not be able to relate.

Let me leave with two examples of problems in this book. Kendall Thomas interviews a black gay man and black lesbian who started radical sex establishments in the City. He introduces his first question with reference to the 1980s Bowers decision and Pat Califia as if these clubowners were as erudite as himself. Later, Munoz jumps from Adorno to Warhol to tearoom art to the psychology of HIV-negative gay men all within 15 pages. I think these two academics are two of the most awesome writers out there and yet I found myself rolling my eyes during both discussions.

This book is unique, yet it gets repetitive after a while. It is quite challenging, yet I still ask myself, "What were all these contributors thinking?!"

I am glad I got the chance to read this book, but some of the balls being juggled here were dropped.