Ruthless clarity ...

... Book Review: All Our Worldly Goods - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The manuscript deserves a documentary of its own, smuggled from place to place as the girls kept eluding the gendarmes seeking to round up Jewish children. Denise, unable to look at the manuscript throughout most of her life, finally after 50 years to open it and discovered not the journal she expected, which explains her reluctance to delve into it, but two parts of what was originally intended to be a five-part novel of the Occupation of France. The manuscript was published in 2004 and became an international best seller, its panoply of characters and its portrait of a war-torn life drawing comparison to "War and Peace."