LOL - Mn is the centre of the wold!
I googled the newspaper review I mentioned below but instead of finding it within the newspapers website, up came Roisin's MN post of the reviewers individual contribution to the Amazon Reviews! So..Roisin posted this in March:
"Reviewer: Dr RAA Eaglestone - See all my reviews
This is a dreadful and misleading book.
First, there a huge number of terrible historical inaccuracies: the book is not so much ?under-researched? as 'not researched at all'. Some of these inaccuracies are minor and excusable. Some are middling (the author has no idea that Auschwitz was in fact a complex of camps, and that the gas chambers were at a different location from the ones he thinks they were, nor about the processes of selection for death; the fences of the camps were both electrified and guarded). Some are major: while thirteen year old boys (like the survivor Elie Wiesel) got away with pretending to be sixteen, younger children ? like the nine year old involved - were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These stretch even the demands of fiction or even the excuse that ?it?s all from a little boys point of view? ? I mean, an electrified fence is an electrified fence. If the author had even bothered to read even two books on the subject ? Robert Jan Van Pelt?s Auschwitz, Raul Hilberg?s Perpetrators Victims and Bystanders, both easily available -- these stupid mistakes would have been avoided. Instead, the story occurs in a sort of ?mythical Holocaust land? (just as if one might set a story in a ?mythical world war II ?land? which claimed to be historical in which Winston Churchill and John Wayne saved Private Ryan while blowing up the Guns of Navarone). And subtitling it ?a fable? doesn?t help or excuse this.
But worse than all this is the misleading faux innocence of the main character, Bruno. He is nine years old in Hitler?s Germany: his father is a high ranking Nazi officer. A real Bruno would be in the Hitler Youth, playing soldiers, bombarded with propaganda and at home playing board games in which the aim was to round up Jews (you can go and see one of these games at the Wiener Library in London): he would have been totally inundated with the evil racist propaganda of the regime, and not at all the naïve innocent he is in this book, with whom we can identify. The Bruno in the book doesn?t even know there is a war going on (can you imagine a book set in 1942 in London, where a nine year old doesn?t know about the war?).
Of course there need to be books for children about the Holocaust, and of course these will ?water down? the events. OK. But this misses the whole point ? that the Nazis turned people in non-humans and did their best to recruit everyone into plans with their propaganda, even ? especially ? nine year old boys. This book is an unresearched cash-in of the worst sort: the author, his agent Simon Trewin (who has given the book a five star review on Amazon, but at least identified himself), and his publisher should be ashamed of themselves, and I advise that the book be withdrawn from publication. "
there is a further MN connection in all this - but i'm not going to tell you what it is!