IRB: Sarah's Key Post #3

"There was no other name my daughter could have had. She was Sarah. My Sarah. An echo to the other one, to the other Sarah, to the little girl with the yellow star who had changed my life" (de Rosnay 293).

Throughout much of the book, the story follows the life of Julia Jarmond as she researches a round-up of Jewish children in France during the Holocaust. After investigating and digging through old documents, she discovers that the apartment her grandmother-in-law lived in was formerly owned by a Jewish family who was deported during the round-up and later sent to die in concentration camps. She sees a photograph of the family and is especially moved to see a little girl in the photo, whom she is told is Sarah Starzinsky. After confronting her in-laws, she discovers that Sarah had connections to the family and that a horrible accident occurred at the apartment involving Sarah's key and her little brother, who never left. She feels compelled to find Sarah and traces her descendants to America and Italy. During this discovery, she realizes the failures of her marriage as her French husband, Bertrand, seems to ignore the past, and this supposedly alters her life. Thus, as the quote illustrates, when Jarmond gives birth to her daughter, she decides to name her Sarah after the little Jewish girl.

IRB: Sarah's Key Post #2

I just finished reading Sarah's Key yesterday, and I was pretty disappointed with how the story unfolded. I originally chose this book because I thought it would focus on a ten-year-old Jewish girl and her family's experience in Vichy France, as described on the back-cover summary and reviews. The cover of the book -- which features two young children running towards a beautiful house -- seems to indicate that this would be the central plot of the story line. However, disappointingly, the novel was predominantly told from the point of view of Julia Jarmond, an annoying American journalist in present-day as she becomes obsessed with finding a particular Jewish family who lived in her husband's grandmother's former apartment in Paris. The first chapter was interesting, told from the point of view of Sarah, the Jewish girl. However, towards the end of the book, it completely shifts to Julia's narration. A lot of the times, especially from Julia's rambling, I felt like the writing was stilted and ineffective. The cover was beautiful, the title was intriguing, and the idea was captivating, but writing was at best mediocre and the author's fictional characters were unpleasant and un-likable. The majority of the book was spent on Julia complaining about her French husband and almost every person she meets in the book is divorced. I expected the book to be more about the Holocaust in France, and not the wayward life of a woman who complains incessantly about her marriage.

Overall lesson: really don't judge a book by its cover.

Page: 293/293

IRB: Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay is told from two different viewpoints -- a third-person perspective from 1942 France during World War II, and a first-person narrative in present-day. The first-person account is told by an American journalist living in Paris, trying to research a round-up that took place during the Vichy regime in July 1942. The chapters alternate between the two perspectives, which I found most interesting so far, as they slowly tie together. Another interesting thing I read about so far is that much of the French seemed to be ignorant of how it was the French police who rounded up French children and sent them to concentration camps, not just the Gestapo or Nazis.

Page #: 108

A Trip to Barnes & Noble

If I was given $25 and walked into Barnes and Noble, I would probably first head over to the classics section because they usually have discounts (by 2 books, get the third free). If I didn't find anything I liked there, I would probably go to the other fiction sections. I would look for authors that I read before and liked or that my friends recommended to me. I would probably choose the book by looking at the cover and the blurb on the back or inside panel, and reading the first few pages to see if it was interesting.

IRB Post #4: Why I Cannot Answer Questions about My Grandfather

Article: Why I Cannot Answer Questions about My Grandfather
Article Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,druck-784373,00.html

The article was written by a famous best-selling German crime author, Ferdinand von Schirach. Schirach was two years old when his grandfather, the leader of the Hitler Youth under the Third Reich, was released from prison. The essay describes what little he knew or understood about his grandfather throughout his life. He began by recounting the few memories he had of his grandfather as a child -- seeing people address him in the street, watching him walk with his knobbly walking stick, playing the board game Nine Men's Morris with him every day. It was interesting how his grandfather seemed so remote and distanced from him. Schirach even recounted that, after he had discovered how his grandfather won the board game using the same trick every time, his grandfather didn't want to play with him anymore and eventually moved away to live alone. When his grandfather died, he left the strange words: "I was one of you" written on his gravestone.

When Schirach was little, he hadn't understood why his grandfather had been locked away. He read a book about the pirate Sir Francis Drake who had been imprisoned, and figured that it must have been exciting and adventurous. He thought that maybe it was a fairy tale curse. Yet, at a relatively young age, Schirach felt "surrounded by something he couldn't explain".

While at a Jesuit boarding school, Schirach learned what his grandfather had been. He saw in his name written in the school textbooks, and several other of his classmates' names: Stauffenberg, Speer, Ribbentrop, Witzleben, and Lüninck. While his own grandfather was the leader of the HJ, his friend Stauffenberg was the grandson of the leader of the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. It was really amazing how each generation was different and how both friends were unaware of their grandparents' roles in history. As the author put it, "Descendents of both the perpetrators and the resistance, all in the same classroom."

As a writer of crime novels, Schirach couldn't come up with a satisfactory explanation for his grandfather's decisions. He interestingly commented that "[historical analysis doesn't seem to make much sense when it's about your own grandfather]". After growing older and looking deeper into his grandfather's past and the Nuremberg Trials, Schirach concluded that his grandfather had no excuse: he had had a happy childhood and his family was of the educated, bourgeois middle class. Most shocking was the fact that his mother was an American, and, until he was five years old, he spoke only English! Schirach couldn't understand why his grandfather, who was learned and cultured, could turn to the brutish National Socialist party, especially when he undoubtedly knew that the Jews were being killed. He even called their removal as "his contribution to European culture."

Schirach realized that he only knew his grandfather as "an old man with an eye patch." He could not comprehend his actions and realized that he didn't know the man very much himself. The article was intriguing, especially through the angle of a grandson of a Nazi leader. He has had to live his life battling that reputation, being badgered by interviews, and ultimately making his own mark in society as a well-known, published author.

IRB Post #3: How Apple Does It

Article: How Apple Does It
Article Source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1118384,00.html

According to the article, Apple was successfully able to revolutionize technology and capture the consumer market by its diversity -- by creating its own hardware (ie. Macbook laptops), its own operating systems (ie. Mac OS X), its software (ie. Safari web browser), and consumer-friendly devices that connected and facilitated the use of these devices (ie. iTunes store). As quoted from the article, "if you smooshed together Microsoft, Dell, and Sony...you'd get something like the Apple technological biosphere." Common sense would indicate that producing so many different branches would cause inefficiency and that companies might be better off specializing in specific pieces. However, in the instance of Apple, Steve Jobs argued that by taking all the steps under wing, he was able to push for specific innovations and make sure that he saw his vision the whole way through. He gave his explanation through a story, which he called "The Parable of the Concept Car:" the concept for a car design looks great in the beginning, but after it is sent to a different engineering team who declares it impossible, it gets worse. Then after it is sent to the manufacturers who also doubt its potential, the product gets worse.

At Apple, instead of having separate stages of sequential development, the teams work together throughout and fluidly collaborate in all steps towards production. Workers at Apple boast that their meetings are efficient and everyone is on the same page. Moreover, with Jobs in control at all stages, he was able to be nitpicky and argue for exactly what he wanted. The article was written in 2005, when the iPod nano first came out. As a tiny, shiny, and compact piece of metal that played music and with easy-to-use buttons, the iPod swept the markets like wildfire. Jobs fought for the iPod’s blueprints, designed its complements, and oversaw the entire process until it reached success.

The resounding theme of the article was that Apple's approach at integration was what made it successful. However, the author conceded that other companies like Microsoft, which focused on operating systems, were also able to reach the pinnacle of success by specialization. It was a combination of integration and control, in Apple’s case, that made it so user-friendly and popular.

IRB: Post #2 Harvard and Class

Article: Harvard and Class
Source: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/07/11/harvard-and-class/

I chose this article expecting to read something interesting about Harvard's community and campus life. However, the piece lacked coherent thought or content. For pages, the author, Misha Glouberman, whined about how he had no Harvard-related connections in Montreal and how he supposedly "threw away" his opportunity as a Harvard graduate. It seriously irked me how the author could complain that he was a Harvard graduate in Canada and had no influential connections. He seems to expect that, by graduating from Harvard, he is entitled to success and recognition in Canada. Harvard gives people access to the most influential social networks – true – but having connections from college will help you get positions only if you are good at what you do. The author just doesn’t seem to fit in this circle. Moreover, Canada has its own top schools with their own influential alumni bases.

The author also went on to complain how Harvard locked up its students in "an ivory tower" by providing housing for its students and "preventing" them from meeting non-Harvard students. Obviously if he stayed in Harvard-only buildings, he would find only Harvard students… If this was “too weird” for him, the author could have just gone off-campus -- other schools are very close in proximity: MIT and Boston University, for instance. I doubt the Harvard community was as constrained as the author described. Just about every college in America tries to piece together a “community” with campus events and college-housing – it’s not just Harvard.

The fact that the author felt the compulsion to write a lengthy piece on how his Harvard experience was “pretty weird” and concluded that he was unsure of his own opinion on the topic only shows aimlessness of his writing. Infuriatingly, his tone was bordering on condescending. Arrogant and with nothing to back it up, the author is very likely to get on readers’ nerves. It is clear that he posted the article to show off how “smart” he was to be accepted to such an elite school and how he was supposedly able to see through the illusion of its perfection as an Ivy League school. How this obtuse, inarticulate drunkard could get accepted to Harvard still remains a wonder to me.