'Night' by Elie Wiesel
By Elie Wiesel

When I was 14 years old, I had to do a book report, so my mom and I went to a library and picked this out. It's a memoir written from a teenager's point of view. In 1944, Elie and his family are sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis, where he watches his father suffer. Reading it changed my relationship with my parents. Instead of talking about kid and family stuff, I was asking them if they knew about the Holocaust and what had happened to European Jews. They said yes, and, with their encouragement, I began to grapple with the ideas of good and evil, the vastness of the world, and the power of the human spirit.