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Book Reviews213 Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban. Vintage, 1997. 363 pages, paper, $14.00. Raban, known as a travel writer who is drawn to the sea, runs aground in eastern Montana in this book. In this dry, desolate landscape, he finds ruined homesteads and abandoned ranches. What happened to the people? Why did they come to this dry land and where did they go? Rabans inquiry weaves together excerpts from an unpublished memoir, visits to the place, pamphlets put out by the railroads to lure settlers, and theories from the homesteading era about scientific agriculture. These theories actuaUy promised the new farmers that more people tflling the soil would make more rain faU. Raban thinks like a geographer, carefuUy piecing together the relationship between these people and this land in the early part of the twentieth century. The bits and pieces are beautifuUy woven together with sympathy for both the people and the place. Prayingfor Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction, by Melissa Fay Greene. Fawcett Books, 1992. 335 pages, paper, $11.00. Melissa Gay Greene asks the question, what was it like when civil rights arrived in a smaU out-of-the-way county in Georgia? We tend to associate the civil rights movement with dramatic moments and sudden change. But the reality came later and more gradually in places like Mcintosh County, Georgia, a coastal backwater that is the private fiefdom ofa domineering Uttle white sheriff. Her book, written in lyrical, evocative prose, foUows one courageous black man who ran for public office in the 1970s. Praying for Sheetrock is history written in a novelistic style. It flirts with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, particularly in several places where Greene seems to enter other people's minds. And unlike much contemporary creative nonfiction, its author is not present as a character. These qualities make for interesting classroom discussion. Penelope Scambly Schott From a World Apart: A Little Girl in the Concentration Camps, by Francine Christophe, translated by Christine Burls. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 179 pages, paper, $15.00. 214Fourth Genre Years ago, I vowed never to read another book about the Nazis, but I'm glad I made this exception. From a World Apart: A Little Girl in the Concentration Camps is an account of a child's four-year imprisonment duringWorldWar II, including a year in Bergen-Belsen. The original version of this book was published in France under the title Une petitefille privilégiée, a privileged girl. That title is both ironic and true; despite her extreme suffering , young Francine reaUy was privileged; by law, the fact that her father was a prisoner ofwar kept the Nazis from kiUing her. Francine has just turned six when the war starts in 1939. In 1940 her father, an officer in the French army, is captured on the front. In the summer of 1942, Francine and her mother are arrested, locked up, and moved from prison to prison within France, where they see convoys ofJews departing for the camps in Germany. In May of 1944, they too are sent to Germany and remain at Bergen-Belsen for a year. Then they are on a train and the SS melts away and abandons them. The war is over, but nobody knows they are stiU alive. "Not a trace ofus. . . .We have disappeared with the phantom train." They walk into a viUage controlled by the Red Army where, two months later, miraculously, they are found by Francine's recently freed father. But these facts are not what make the memoir special. It is the purity of tone that creates the effect. The author remains absolutely true to the perceptions of a child. She neither analyzes nor editoriafizes. She reports clearly and simply, and therefore the more devastatingly The detaüs are matter-of-fact:The children "hanging around in the camp alley ways, breathing in the smeU of burning men, counting the dead pfled up to distract ourselves, comparing them (look, that one has a hairy chest, and that one has twisted feet). ..." Or her anger at her mother: "I can't take it any more, Mother. I'm cold, I'm hungry I'm hurting...

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