Product Description

Anne Frank's diary is the most widely-read book after the Bible, yet never before has a biography of her been published. Carol Anne Lee has been allowed access to previously unpublished documents and gives a definitive account of Anne Frank's short life before, during and after the diary.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #494024 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Carol Ann Lee was born in Yorkshire in 1969. She lives in Amsterdam.

Customer Reviews

A three dimensional view of Anne Frank and her family
This book is the story of Anne Frank but it is also about the resilience of the human spirit,as the story is also about Anne Frank's father, Otto, the only member of the family to survive betrayal, deportation and the death camps.There can be few biographies in which the characters described within its pages could be capable, on the one hand, of unspeakable cruelty and casual sadism and on the other of selfless generosity and courage. The author adds some depth and colour to the events and descriptions contained in Anne's diary itself, and follows her and her family to the camps. Eyewitness accounts add to the authenticity of the reports.Otto Frank emerges as the only survivor of this terrible ordeal with great dignity. We can be profoundly grateful to him for allowing his daughter's diary to be published.

Heartbreaking
I've never been so affected by a book. Anne Frank is my hero, having read her diary repeatedly I discovered and read Carol's biography. I could not put it down, and for a day after finishing it I didn't want to do anything else ever again. Reading this felt like hearing a friend had died. You know how it ends but it still breaks your heart as you keep hoping for a happy ending. Superbly written & researched, it covers before during and after the diary. Everyone's memories of Anne after the eight were caught make you love her even more. (Like Anne being an assistant and bread-distributor in the barracks or talking to a sick boy every night.) Carol Ann Lee has done justice to the story of the boisterous, witty teenager who humbled the world.

Intensely powerful
Carol Ann Lee's meticulous research, coupled with her natural flair for telling a good story, make this biography one of the most fascinating accounts of Anne Frank's life ever to appear. Beginning with the sudden arrest of the hidden Frank and van Pels families, Lee goes on to describe Anne's early life, her emigration to the Netherlands, her years in the hiding place, her great gift as a writer, and ultimately her death in the Nazi extermination camps. She also places Anne's life in a broader historical context, packing the book with information on the rise of Nazism, the invasion of the Netherlands, and the systematic rounding up and annihilation of Dutch Jewry. Her theories on who exactly betrayed Anne Frank make gripping reading.

She presents Anne as a real person, not a haloed angel, and is one of the few writers who has actually paid close attention to the people in Anne's life - her mother, her reclusive but phenomenally gifted sister, even her American penfriend. The result is not only a vivid portrait of one of the most talented writers that the world has ever been unfortunate enough to lose, but a candid snapshot of a laughing, living girl. I closed the book feeling as if Anne might come bursting into the room at any moment.

On a more sober note, Lee disabuses us of the comfortable notion that Anne's most famous sentiment ("I still believe that all people are good at heart") must have immunised her against the suffering in the camps. Her death was not the gentle expiration of a calm, dispassionate saint. It was painful and cruel and sickening. In graphic language, drawing heavily on the testimony of survivors, Lee pulls us into the camps and forces us to watch as Anne eventually succumbs to malnutrition and horrific disease.

Yet this book is essentially hopeful, with a powerful and positive message. The final chapters, dealing with the phenomenal success of the diary, leave the reader feeling that because the diary has survived 'so too, in some mysterious way, has the author'.

'Roses from the Earth' turns Anne Frank the Holocaust cover girl into Anne Frank the human being. Read it.