"Night" by Elie Wiesel

At first, it took me some time to get comfortable with Wiesel's writing style. He utilizes several short sentences which create a choppy reading which I am not accustomed to. Ultimately, I think this was actually beneficial to the story. Having so many short sentences gave a truer sense of immediacy and fear, which is what the author felt while living through the Holocaust. This is an interesting prospect as I consider teaching the book to my own future classes. This is a book I would teach mostly for an accurate representation of the Holocaust, but I would also be able to bring up how sentence structure can mirror a story and that this gives way for more effective story telling. In turn, I could use that and have students write their own story about a difficult time in which they focus on how their word choice and structure effects the piece as a whole.
Moving into a slightly less geeky review, Night is a wonderful and tragic book. This is the book students should really be reading because it is done so beautifully and really does forces readers to feel something. Books that elicit strong emotional reactions are far more memorable and that comes with greater comprehension. Many WWII texts are emotional in this way, but this one is less widely used and that is appealing to me as a future teacher. I do think reading Anne Frank is important, but this particular story offers a very different view and would add a lot to student's understanding of that period of time. This is one of those topics where a bigger scope of reading is especially needed.
I do not know that I will end up teaching WWII units when I have my own classroom, but if I do, this is definitely a text I want to utilize.