The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo *****

by Stieg Larsson, Reg Keeland (Translator)

No sense in your wasting time reading a review of this thriller.

Just buy it (it's in paper now) and be sure you have nothing else scheduled for the next 24 hours when you start reading it.

Two million Europeans couldn't put it down.

Nor could I.

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In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer *****

by Irene Opdyke

I got to this memoir after my daughter recently saw and raved about the NY play (Irena's Vow) based on the book.

In My Hands was written by a 23 year old Polish a nursing student after surviving six years of separation from her family, rapes by Russian soldiers and several years of servitude to German officers.

But it is not another Holocaust book. Or rather, it's a different kind of a Holocaust book. It's the story of an Polish adolescent who decides that what's happening to the Jews is sickening. She first helps Jews in a ghetto by leaving food under a fence for them.

Then she protects Jews she is supervising in a German controlled hotel/headquarters. She later hides 12 of them in a villa where she has become the housekeeper for a German major (so they will not be killed). The German major discovers what she is doing. She becomes his mistress to protect these 12 Jews and a baby. Eventually she escapes and joins the Polish partisans as the Germans are retreating. Finally, she gets home, only to find many members of her family are no longer alive.

She eventually come to the US, has a family of her own, and only in her later years does she begin to speak out about what she did, what she saw, and what happened in Poland.

Her memoir is both a riveting adventure story and an example of how one individual, an adolescent in this case, makes a difference in the world when she has courage and chooses not to accept terrible wrongs.

Worth reading. And according to my daughter and wife, worth seeing too.