My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.

It's a happy life, but someone is missing. It's a happy life, and someone is missing.

My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

For some people, history is simply what your wife looks good standing in front of. It’s what’s cast in bronze, or framed in sepia tones, or acted out with wax dummies and period furniture. It takes place in glass bubbles filled with water and chunks of plastic snow; it’s stamped on souvenir pencils and summarized in reprint newspapers. History nowadays is recorded in memorabilia. If you can’t purchase a shopping bag that alludes to something, people won’t believe it ever happened.