Tuesday, February 21, 2023

What I'm Reading (There is simply too much...)

 

LOVE the title of the Saul Bellow nonfiction collection, There Is Simply too Much to Think About. Yes! So far, I enjoy some of his sentences, but I don't follow a lot of his early essays---I am lost when he muses, for instance, about the state of the novel seventy years ago.
Will stop reading in chronological order and choose topics I can better enter into.

Wanted to quote a little bit more from My Father's Keeper, to give context for that quote yesterday about the son of Hans Frank, Nazi governor of German-occupied Poland, dying of drinking too much milk.

Hans Frank had kept a daily journal, which he turned over for the Nuremberg Trials (oddly, since it was full of flagrant proof of his guilt).
Anyway, re food, he wrote:

9 September 1941

...research shows that the greater part of the Polish population consumes only around 600 calories a day, while the usual requirement for a human being is 2200 calories.
...Our general principle is that we sympathize only with our own German people and with no one else in the world.

15 October 1941

... no further food supplies will be made available to the Jewish population.

...that we are condemning 1.2 million Jews to death by starvation is only to be noted in passing.

1 comment:

Ms. Moon said...

That is some weird and effed up Nazi milk-drinking thinking there.
I agree with you about the title of the Bellow book. It's great.