Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Oprah Picks Another Memoir!

After the recent debacle and continuing brouhaha about Oprah's last book club choice: the recently debunked A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, Oprah has picked Night by Elie Wiesel. According to the Amazon.com annotation, "Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's wrenching attempt to find meaning in the horror of the Holocaust is technically a novel, but it's based so closely on his own experiences in Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald that it's generally--and not inaccurately--read as an autobiography." BHPL has Night cataloged as biography. A quick look at JerseyCat (the union catalog of most NJ libraries) shows that Night is cataloged as fiction OR as a biography OR placed in the Dewey non-fiction number for Holocaust history. So it seems that assigning a book to the category of memoir/autobiography/history/or non-fiction isn't easy. But no one is going to dispute the veracity of Wiesel's book, so it should be a safe bet for Oprah this month.

No comments: