Anne Frank -- A True Superhero

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

by: Anne Frank

Amazon Price: $5.99 (as of 12/10/2009)

Amazon Product Description: A beloved classic since its initial publication in 1947, this vivid, insightful journal is a fitting memorial to the gifted Jewish teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen, Germany, in 1945. Born in 1929, Anne Frank received a blank diary on her 13th birthday, just weeks before she and her family went into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

Her marvelously detailed, engagingly personal entries chronicle 25 trying months of claustrophobic, quarrelsome intimacy with her parents, sister, a second family, and a middle-aged dentist who has little tolerance for Anne's vivacity.

The diary's universal appeal stems from its riveting blend of the grubby particulars of life during wartime (scant, bad food; shabby, outgrown clothes that can't be replaced; constant fear of discovery) and candid discussion of emotions familiar to every adolescent (everyone criticizes me, no one sees my real nature, when will I be loved?).

Yet Frank was no ordinary teen: the later entries reveal a sense of compassion and a spiritual depth remarkable in a girl barely 15. Her death epitomizes the madness of the Holocaust, but for the millions who meet Anne through her diary, it is also a very individual loss. --Wendy Smith

Anne Frank - The Whole Story

Amazon Price: $11.99 (as of 12/10/2009)

Amazon Product Description: Anne Frank: The Whole Story delivers exactly what it promises: the incredibly moving complete story of Anne Frank, going beyond what the Jewish teenage girl wrote in her widely read diary. Anne, along with her family and friends of her family, hid in a secret annex behind her father's office in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She dutifully kept a diary, which became a worldwide bestseller when her father published it in the 1950s.

The story has been adapted for television and movies before, but this version, which played on ABC television, moves beyond what Anne wrote, meeting up with the Frank family before Anne receives her diary, and following her past the diary's last entries into Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Hannah Taylor Gordon is a superb Anne, bringing to life the multifaceted girl, in turns intelligent, dreamy, creative, spoiled, and bratty, a girl like any other except that Anne is a Jew in Nazi-occupied Holland. The only one who outshines Gordon is Ben Kingsley as Anne's father, Otto Frank. His quiet performance is extraordinarily powerful; as he watches his family slip away, it is impossible not to feel his grief.

This brave film is difficult in parts to watch--the concentration camp scenes are brutal--but this is a remarkable adaptation of Anne's life, and it is a film to be shared and discussed and remembered. --Jenny Brown

The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition

by: Netherlands Institute For War Documentation

Amazon Price: $52.50 (as of 12/11/2009)

Amazon Product Description: Hardcover: 864 pages
Publisher: Doubleday; Revised & updated edition (March 25, 2003).

Read the first page!